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Comment by etaioinshrdlu | Hacker News Reader

Does any free web framework have something more thorough than rails' Active Admin?

Django admin seems pretty unfinished by comparison. Haven't seen anything actually better.

I've tried to work with ActiveAdmin on several consecutive projects, and I do not understand the draw. It's a fussy DSL that requires you work with your data in a way that feels very un-Rails. You basically have to approach building out your UX from the perspective of what the tool is designed to do. This seems a shame, in the context of Rails - a framework that's actually pretty great at getting out of the way in the right places.

Of course, there are people in this thread who prefer writing Rack endpoints over the thorny complexity of Sinatra. You really can't make everyone happy all of the time.

I hate ActiveAdmin because of exactly what you say, but tbh it is indeed a very powerful tool and still allows you to very quickly spin up admin pages (to a certain limit, but this limit is pretty high). I yet have to find something similar.

While it is not a 1:1 replacement for the end-goal of a drop-in admin, I've had some success with datagrid: https://github.com/bogdan/datagrid

A good way to think of it is as a drop-in for the index view of many admin modules, which is the filtering, sorting and pagination of tabular data. This is the specific pain I want to be abstracted away... not the entirely conceptual UX of my admin in general.

Have you tried RailsAdmin? It does a great job of getting you over the line with the basics (though configuring it can be fussy and customising it is pretty miserable).

I use hanami (https://hanamirb.org/) instead of Rail. My admin interface of choice is Forest (https://www.forestadmin.com/) since I cannot use ActiveAdmin outside of Rails.

I have worked with Django a few years and I only use the Django Admin initially, to confirm a couple of things and maybe experiment with a data model. Within a few days I usually remove it. There is no need for a production system to retain the Django Admin, in my opinion, but others may disagree with me here.

You could give https://github.com/thoughtbot/administrate a try.

GraphQL API + https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

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