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Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

avohq.io

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Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#131

Post by pelagicAustral »

vladcodes wrote: post #103
adrianthedev wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"draft an MVP in html/js with something like Firestore as a backend"... so much here. It sounds easy, but is it? I remember the days when I would get stuck on a webpacker config issue instead of working on the real meat of my app. I speak weekly with developers that tell me "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do. They really can't. It's a tough thing to m…

> "oh, you made an admin panel. I could build that in a few hours. we don't need it." and they never do. I was never saying making anything with any technology is easy. Developing with plain Rails and a minimum of gems is linearly difficult while developing with a set of DSL/generators like Avo can lead to a complexity spike from 1 to 11 in no time. And the worst thing — at a random stage of development. From the bus…

I wholeheartedly agree with this post. I have used/tried every admin panel creator gem under the sun. Or other 'quickstart' products out there such as Jumpstart. Other than that there has been several efforts to make admin panels for rapid app creation that come with some CSS flavor. And always end up hitting the same ceiling, that one feature that cannot be created due to DLS limitations or whatever, and then its all back to square one just that now you have to hack the shit out of the app to make things work.

Never going down the road of using tools like OP's one, I rather spend more time writing boilerplate, which in the end is what's saving here.

It does look like a nicely crafted project and I wish OP luck with it.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#132

Post by excid3 »

weaksauce wrote: post #122
excid3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, Avo is a great alternative to the free admin we ship with (Administrate). And Jumpstart Pro customers get 20% off their first year of Avo. Thanks for sharing that discount Adrian!

Is there a reason jumpstart runs on madmin and jumpstart pro runs on administrate?

Just need to finish adding some more features to madmin.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#133

Post by robocat »

gkoberger wrote: post #31
adrianthedev wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wonderful! On point feedback! I had quite a tough time promoting the product and the homepage calculator was one push to highlight one quality of Avo ($ savings). But I agree, that's shouldn't be the biggest selling point. I'll make sure to position the product differently. Thank you!

For what it's worth, I do like that it builds as you scroll down! It shows how much goes into building an app. I wonder if switching the focus to just the dev time, or even have some sort of chart of all the other tools that slowly merges into Avo? EDIT: Or a cute "Dev todo list" that gets crossed off ( https://roughnotation.com/ ) as you scroll down, and Avo takes care of things for you?

I saw roughnotation used beautifully here https://ifuckinghatejira.com/15/ and I was jealous. Now I know how to do it myself, thank you.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#135

Post by jay3ss »

boxed wrote: post #127
canadiantim wrote: post #11

Looks awesome. I'm a bit jealous Rails has this resource coming from the Django world (although I know django admin also great but has its limitations)

Look into iommi ( https://docs.iommi.rocks ). It does similar things imo. Disclaimer: I'm one of the authors of iommi.

This is really cool and I like the Tony Iommi take too. Did you pick the name because Iommi's accident and instrument align similarly with Django Reinhardt's?

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#136

Post by diehunde »

adrianthedev wrote: post #2

Hey HN, I'm Adrian, an indie developer and creator of Avo. For more than ten years, I built countless admin panels and back-offices for all types of apps. After a while, you start to notice patterns and extract functionality away to make the job easier. I took those patterns and applied them to Avo. Now, in just an hour, a developer can build production-ready applications that with traditional coding techniques take…

Have you migrated any medium or big-size ActiveAdmin projects to Avo? If so, how much work would you say it takes? UI looks great by the way.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#137

Post by w-ll »

@adrianthedev I gave it an hour and here are my thoughts.

Generators for resources should be smarter and look a models attributes and type_for_attribute and add all the fields for me. Things like enums should be easier than needed to also specify them as select options.

You also dont have any datetime field types. (edit it appears you do but the docs dont list them on the https://docs.avohq.io/1.0/field-options.html)

Also using the models schema should give you default filtering. Strings should be loose, numbers/enums should be exact, datetime should be ranged.

All attributes should also be default sortable.

The suggested generators for namespaced models ```bin/rails generate avo:resource Cms::Page``` dont seam to work.

It feels like its for admin/mgmt stuff but you say its also for normal users and i feel like it under delivers on both.

Hope this feedback helps.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#139

Post by nirvdrum »

danenania wrote: post #119
nirvdrum wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the approach JetBrains takes with their IDE suite and it's the best of both worlds in my opinion. It takes most of the risk out of the decision-making process. To date I've kept my subscription active, but I probably wouldn't have signed up if I didn't have a fallback option. Maybe this is an esoteric case, but I have a project from a previously operating business (TechStars Boston 2010). Every now and then I…

Just to be clear, I’m not arguing that he should remove the fallback option, just that a subscription should be the default. I agree the fallback is a good thing that reduces lock-in/shutdown risk. But that benefit can still be offered alongside a yearly subscription.

Gotcha. My misunderstanding.

Re: Show HN: Avo – Build Ruby on Rails apps faster

#140

Post by irjustin »

This looks really good.

So a bit of insight from a dinosaur, I'm one of those guys who is a diehard ActiveAdmin user. I've come and gone through the other admin interfaces and nothing is as fast as ActiveAdmin when it comes to the basics.

Important note is ActiveAdmin is for internal/staff only.

Benefits

- It doesn't need to be pretty. It simply needs to function.

- Layout actually should be allowed to be information dense. Less whitespace (i.e. not bootstrap).

- DSL of ActiveAdmin is TERRIBLE, but once you learn the DSL, spinning up a page to edit an object is insanely fast because of it.

- Changes to objects are typically one liners.

- Escape hatches make everything else possible, but it's not intuitive at all.

Difficulties of ActiveAdmin

- Adding Wizards, step-by-step, pages is pretty annoying

- Polymorphic relationships aren't intuitive.

- Learning how to carry the page's context to use arb takes some time.

- Customizing f.input is annoying and doesn't make sense.

- Doesn't play well with bootstrap nor modals.

In the end the difficulties are worth the problems because the time benefit is so high. It's measured in how much time our engineers spend working inside of ActiveAdmin. It's very low compared to other areas.

In the past, I've been stuck fighting React, or doing too much boiler plate.

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