navaneethpk

Agreed.

>I can build it, but my sales and marketing talents are quite lacking.

Can relate to this. What worked well in the case of ToolJet is that the product did not require marketing efforts to get the initial traction since the project is open-source.

I've written another article that explains how we raised seed round here: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-...

Glad that you found the article helpful :)

ToolJet cannot be used as an alternative for Zapier as it doesn't have workflow automation capabilities. Probably this was the reason for dropping.

Stack matters a lot if the project is open-source. We migrated ToolJet's backend from Rails to node after the beta launch last year. We've documented the thoughts behind out decision here: https://blog.tooljet.com/migrating-toojet-from-ruby-on-rails....

The benefits that we got: - Contributions from around 200 contributors so far. - We built a plugin system and plugin development kit that helps community build plugins for ToolJet.

ToolJet anyway is extendable via JS ( use JS anywhere on editor, run custom JS snippets, bring your own React components, etc ), stack also being 100% JS/TS made sense for us.

I think the data is not updated, number of contributors & stars seems incorrect.

I would say their feedback made sense. While the idea was convincing but it was just an idea, the product was only a couple of weeks into development and had zero traction.

Fortunately we were able to find VCs who believe that COSS is not meant for an exit or monetisation in the early days.

Had seen Windmill a while ago, nice work and happy to chat, let me send you an email to get connected.

Wrote a while ago about how we built a VC backed open-source business: https://blog.tooljet.com/raising-vc-funding-for-open-source-....

Few popular OSS projects that use NestJS:

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet ( open-source low-code framework )

https://github.com/ever-co/ever ( Commerce Platform for On-Demand Economy )

https://github.com/feednext/feednext ( Open-Source Social Media Application )

https://github.com/Roche/lxdhub ( Profits Sharing Platform for modern agencies and studios )

https://github.com/notadd/notadd ( Microservice development architecture )

https://github.com/vendure-ecommerce/vendure ( headless GraphQL ecommerce framework )

https://github.com/pvarentsov/iola ( Socket client with Rest API )

https://github.com/amplication/amplication ( Auto-generates backend apps )

We've built an open-source low-code framework (https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet) with Tabler as the base for our UI components. choosing Tabler was one of our best decisions, it helped us ship new UI components faster.

Founder of ToolJet here. ToolJet can be used for building public-facing apps but our focus is only on internal tools. Building public-facing apps will require more design customisation options, a built-in database that will scale well, payments/subscription features, user management features, etc. Right now our goal is to make it easier for developers to build internal tools quickly with the help of drag and drop application builder and the ability to connect to all the possible data sources with less code.

The custom authentication is in our roadmap but we might not support authentication from data stored in a Google sheet. Row level access control is not possible using ToolJet at the moment. This is something that we would look in to in the future but we are yet to plan how this feature will look like.

3. ToolJet

Using low-code tools might be a great idea to build frontends without coding at all. If you are using open-source frameworks such as https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet , you can save some significant time building your application.

TypeORM has a lot of issues but in our case it hasn't caused any major blockers. Most of the time the issue is with documentation and sometimes you run into issues like this: https://github.com/typeorm/typeorm/issues/316.

NestJS on the other hand is very solid. It has good documentation and a good community. We haven't faced any issues with NestJS yet.

We recently migrated ToolJet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27421408)'s server from Ruby ( Rails ) to TypeScript ( Nest.js ). Our goal was to have only one language in our stack so that it will be easy for the open-source contributors. I have been working as a Ruby dev since 2015 and I really love Ruby. Initially I thought we might miss a lot of things when we switch to TS. But it turned out to be a great decision in the end.

The bad:

   - Cannot compare Rails' ActiveRecord with TypeORM. TypeORM still lacks proper documentation and sometimes we even had to write raw SQL (or use the query builder feature )for joins.

   - Testing using Minitest (Ruby) is easy and the code looks very clean. It is not as easy to go through our Jest tests. Also the test suite required some customisations for small stuffs like cleaning the db after every test.   

   - There is no clear winner for web frameworks in Node ecosystem. The framework you choose will be less adopted and less matured than Rails.

The good:

   - A lot more applicants for the backend roles. We tried to hire senior Ruby developers in June and we got only a few applicants. After switching to Node, hiring has become easy.

   - Having only one language in the stack is helping us get contributions from more external developers. 

   - Nest.js is not very opinionated, we can easily customise it to follow the conventions and directory structure followed by Rails.

We have explained more on our blog: https://blog.tooljet.com/migrating-toojet-from-ruby-on-rails...

That was a very low-hanging fruit. Could fix and deploy it in a few minutes. There are few other improvements too related to navigation in the latest Docusaurus. Deployed here: https://docs.tooljet.com

Your comment was super helpful. I just tried upgrading to 2.0.0-beta.9. The menu now looks great on mobile. The upgrade is causing some other issues, will fix those and deploy the docs. Thanks!

Thanks, I will try creating a custom react component for handling the modes.

We tried to use Typesense for the search bar. We could not wrap up the PR due to bandwidth issues but it should be a great alternative for Algolia. Link: https://github.com/typesense/typesense-docsearch-scraper

Haven't tried this but will it work on both GitHub and Docusaurus if the section "S3" is renamed as "Amazon S3" and then removing the "{#aws-s3}" part?

I think it is because we have explicitly set the height of the images (https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/docs/docs/in...). Will fix it.

You are right, placing the navigation on the sidebar is more useful than the links to GitHub and Slack.

It comes out of the box. We are now trying to figure out how to switch screenshots based on the light/dark mode. The screenshots taken from light mode of ToolJet looks odd in Docusaurus' dark mode.

We are using Docusaurus (https://docusaurus.io/ ).

   - it is easy to configure/customise 
   - looks really great out of the box
   - solid documentation
   - fast

In our case, we just had to change the colors and font. Here is our Docusaurus code if that's helpful: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/tree/develop/docs and here is the live documentation: https://docs.tooljet.com/

The contributions of communities in the growth of programming languages is huge. If no-code/low-code is looking at a similar trajectory, open-source frameworks might prove to be the best options.

Examples: ToolJet: https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet Obsei: https://github.com/obsei/obsei n8n: https://github.com/n8n-io/n8n

I am one of the maintainers of ToolJet (https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet). ToolJet is an open source no-code platform that can connect to all of your existing data sources such as databases and APIs to build applications using a drag and drop interface.

TypeORM is good but sometimes you will have to go through the codebase to understand how it works better.