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Comment by tomp | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone suggest a tool that is similar to Retool / AppSmith / JetAdmin

BUT for programmers? I.e. I don't care about "no code" (happy to code myself, in fact I think it's best to be able to customize things in code) but that takes care of things like backend-frontend sync (ideally push-based), permissions, etc. is fast (looking at you, AppSmith) and ideally also automates some tasks (e.g. auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin)?

Just my wishlist...

Edit: another way of describing what I want: I would like to be able to edit the SQL database (or whatever data backend) via an interface that can be Excel-like (just a list of rows), custom (just a GUI of custom components) or a mix (e.g. rows with search, or grouped by some key, or multi-editing several rows, or displaying foreign key relationships ("parent" row and "child" rows)).

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There’s a lot of other suggestions, but I’ll recommend my own: https://airplane.dev/

You can quickly turn scripts, SQL, REST endpoints, etc into lightweight internal apps with UI, permissions, approval flows, audit logs, and more. It’s like AWS Lambda but geared towards human-executable tasks.

Similar to what you’re looking for, all the UI etc is autogenerated. It’s not a drag-and-drop / WYSIWYG app builder.

Send me a note at ravi@airplane.dev if you’d like to chat about it.

Not OP but glad you mentioned this. We're starting to look at internal tooling libraries and this looks really interesting.

This is retool, retool sometimes gets marketed as 'nocode' but really benefits from past developer experience, I think you could build exactly what you want using it.

Thought the same, if you love coding, Retools seems like a resonable solution for that. There are a handful of GUIs on teh market, but those are typically data source-specific.

What you seem to be looking for exists and it’s called Directus: https://directus.io/ (authentification, permissions, GQL/REST API, admin interface, etc.)

But I would not call Directus a NoCode platform, it’s just a turn-key backend on top of a SQL database (also providing an admin interface).

I am myself a very satisfied user (for the last two months or so; Directus existed for a few years).

Have a look.

I've been spending the last few days looking into solutions in this space for the umpteenth time and Directus does seem to be one of the most interesting ones. It's basically a non-intrusive, flexible and extensible GUI on top of your DB, plus a REST API generated from it. Another big plus is it's open source.

It actually exists since 2004, so it would be fair to say it's been more than a few years. But they recently switched from PHP to Node.

Other solutions (with varying degrees of similarity) include Strapi, PostgREST, Hasura...

I've built Zero.sh - It allows you to code your own backend live in the browser, while we do the heavy lifting for the annoying parts (frontend, caching, authentication, etc.) - Try the playground at https://zero.sh/play (you don't need to login). Also do try to change the component on the top right of the playground.

Hi there,

throwing my hat into the ring. :) We're developing a language-independent "low-code" environment that's very much made for coders. Website is www.five.co

To give a few examples: 1. For your database, you can either import an SQL dump, or you can create the tables, relationships, etc. in point-and-click. We're using MySQL by default, but are database-agnostic. 2. You can write queries in SQL and use the result of these queries for things like charts, tables or dashboards. 3. You can write JavaScript, TypeScript and C# to create functions or processes used by your app. In the future, any language that can be compiled to WebAssembly can be used inside Five. We use Google's V8 engine for this. We also support libraries and plug-ins. 4. The GUI is provided by Five. All you've got to do is give it a theme in CSS or point-and-click. The GUI is responsive. We use Material UI. 5. Each app comes with three environments (dev, staging, production). All apps are containerized. We're using K8.

Our idea is to give developers a tool that let's them code as much as they want to, but provide "no-code" options for the more tedious tasks of development.

We don't have a trial on our website yet, but feel free to contact me and I can give you access to a training account.

What I am building is along those lines. It's more geared towards dashboards, and button-based interactions. But technically, you can code whatever. Right now it's a desktop app, cause then you don't have to deploy a server and screw around with CORS, and all that. All the people that use it so far use for internal apps, so they're fine with that.

https://www.jigdev.com

Let me know if that could be of interest, and if yes, what the tool is missing.

If you know python (Which I am assuming you do because you mentioned Django) https://anvil.works/ is probably a really good solution for you. They also just updated their pricing, and they are open sourced.

They have a GUI editor and their custom server runs a full python backend. One of the co-founder's has given a lot of talks about designing their system and I think it's pretty interesting.

Not sure if it's what you really want to see but there's a new solution called Serverless Cloud that lets you write only code in JS/TS. This platform handles the infra management itself. It has frontend sync, global CDN, secret management, event-driven design possibilities. https://www.serverless.com/cloud/

You should check Motor Admin open-source tool (I'm the creator of the tool): https://github.com/motor-admin/motor-admin

>Auto-generating the GUI from SQL schema, similar to the original Django Admin

Thats exactly how Motor Admin works :)

I am building a tool that might satisfy some of your wants (the alpha is not completely ready yet).

It is code based, but everything else is taken care of including the UI which is auto-generated from your script parameters/signature in Python.

https://windmill.dev

Let me know what you think :)

Is it inspired by airplane.dev?

We have a lot in common indeed at this stage but there is a lot of incoming features that would differentiate us. They have a great team and their execution is excellent. I had the itch to start such tool for a long time and seeing that the ecosystem was growing, including airplane.dev inspired me to start my own.

Hi, just FYI, the `www.` version of your domain isn't working. I tried to replace the `docs.` subdomain from the URL and got an error.

I working on something like this.

https://widgetterminal.carrd.co/

My contact info is in my HN profile. Reach out if you want a demo.

I think what you are looking for is retool plus a nice SQL client. Its really flexible and takes away a lot of pain from the front end. I wish it had an integrated DB editor.

I use retool a lot, you can "hack it" with js code in the frontend, eventhough i load a lot of the code on my backend apis.

you should check out Budibase, its got all the good parts of no code (nothing you said indicates you really want to be futzing around with css to get basic stuff up) but lets you code the important parts yourself and is open source so you can mod things if you need to

https://budibase.com

https://dbeaver.io

Love dbeaver. The cloud version is cloudbeaver.io

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