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Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

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Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#41

Post by foxbee »

swyx wrote: post #40
foxbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

I have to say I was very impressed when I tried out Budibase and was able to create a CRUD app out of the box without looking at docs. You guys are easier to use than Retool — and self hostable/open source!! i have no idea what it's like to work on this problem for 2 years but really looking forward to see what you become. the youtube updates are super helpful btw pls keep that up

Appreciate your feedback. With the latest release, we're in a much better position to release quicker, and communicate better.

We're still in beta, and yet to launch to Hackernews, PH, etc, so looking forward to that over the next few months.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#42

Post by hangtwenty »

sdesol wrote: post #39
foxbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

> Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. Here is an analysis of Tooljet development in the last 90 days https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... I also did one for budibase as well https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... Disclaimer: I'm the creator of GitSense

GitSense seems very useful. Constructive feedback about the UI: replace the (straggler?) serif font with the sans serif font you're using elsewhere on the page

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#43

Post by foxbee »

sdesol wrote: post #39
foxbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

> Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. Here is an analysis of Tooljet development in the last 90 days https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... I also did one for budibase as well https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... Disclaimer: I'm the creator of GitSense

Awesome tool. Have you considered adding support/analytics around Github discussions?

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#44

Post by moosebear847 »

foxbee wrote: post #20
navaneethpk wrote: post #2

Founder here, ToolJet is a no-code platform for building & deploying custom internal tools. ToolJet is built using Ruby on Rails and ReactJS. ToolJet can connect to existing data sources of companies such as databases, Google sheets, API endpoints, external services, and more. ToolJet's drag and drop app builder can quickly create UI widgets such as tables, charts, forms, etc and connect these widgets with the data f…

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

Would this be considered product thread hijacking? The 'compliment' could also be interpreted as a disguised subtle diss (7wk product vs 2yr one)..

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#45

Post by codingdave »

I feel like low-code apps like this have hit commodity level.

A bit of history - in the late 90s, you could (and we did) build a multi-million dollar product doing basic content management for plain old web pages. That heydey lasted a couple years before Wordpress and other such tools came around and basic CMS was more of a solved problem than a unique product.

The same has occurred over the years in multiple niches - a tool that would have been a terrific SaaS at one point gets built out, normalized, and well understood... to the point that it is no longer a unique value prop to just build a tool that solves problem X. You need to build the tool AND have some unique perspective and value prop that escalates it above all the others.

Low-code CRUD builders with DB integration and some basic workflow, reporting, and security now have hit that mark. There have always been big players in this market (Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, etc.) It is good to see smaller players coming into their own in recent years, and this specific one is open source, which is a nice differentiator between it and many others.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#46

Post by riku_iki »

sdesol wrote: post #39
foxbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

> Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. Here is an analysis of Tooljet development in the last 90 days https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... I also did one for budibase as well https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind... Disclaimer: I'm the creator of GitSense

Why no LoC included, it seems most useful metric. Also bugs filed/fixed would be helpful too.

Thank you for your effort!

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#47

Post by foxbee »

moosebear847 wrote: post #44
foxbee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now. It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users. We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase ove…

Would this be considered product thread hijacking? The 'compliment' could also be interpreted as a disguised subtle diss (7wk product vs 2yr one)..

It's not a diss. It is a compliment.

Re: Show HN: Open-source alternative to Retool, Internal.io, etc.

#49

Post by e12e »

navaneethpk wrote: post #28
e12e wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks very interesting... But no tests? I'm not 100% happy with a project at work, where we're building out a jsonapi from a legacy rails app (part rewrite in-place, part move to react for front-end) - and after setting it up rswag with integration tests generating swagger schemas has been pretty nice. Not quite decided on what I think about activemodel::serializer... But it mostly works, without too much tweaki…

Rswag looks cool, will try it out. There are tests for rails controllers and I have recently setup Cypress for component testing, will be focusing on tests the coming days.

> There are tests for rails controllers

I only found one:

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/test/control...

The others appear to be empty scaffolds (which imnho is worse than no tests, really), eg:

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/test/control...

  require "test_helper"

  class FoldersControllerTest
Same for empty model tests etc - I'd strongly encourage removing them - as they just add noise.

Btw, if not doing tdd, time is probably better spent on integration tests than controller/model tests. Main challenge I've found with rails projects that were put in use with no tests, is there's a big effort to set up test data/fixtures from scratch. One option can sometimes be to just set up a test database with real data (database dump as a fixture).

> and I have recently setup Cypress for component testing

That's nice, and probably a good focus for a project like this.

Ed: as for mocking/integration testing apis - which might be useful here, there's "vcr": https://github.com/vcr/vcr

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