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by vijucat 2511 days ago
How is extensibility handled (on the UI side, on the back-end)? Are internals transparent or is it meant to be a black box? Just wondering what happens if one hits the boundaries of what the tool can do and wants to extend or integrate...

The last time I evaluated RAD (Rapid Application Development, for all you cool folks who refuse to know anything that wasn't invented after JavaScript) tool-builders, I really liked https://www.awareim.com/. They're not that famous, but I appreciated the extensibility.

1 comments

We're engineers, and Retool is built for engineers. So it's pretty flexible: the internals are all available for you to see and modify (every Retool app is serialized to a YAML blob, and can be synced bi-directionally to Git), you can write JS in most places, as well as import npm packages (everything inside {{ }} is sandboxed JS), the front-end components are extensible (you can import your own React, Vue, etc. components), and the back-end we're completely agnostic towards (we connect to any REST / GraphQL API, as well as most databases).

Here's more info on:

* git syncing: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/git-syncing

* hosting on-prem: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/setup-instructions

* custom components: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/custom-react-components

* using JS between {{}}: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/javascript-overview

* writing custom JS: https://docs.tryretool.com/docs/custom-js-code

Let me know if there's anything else I can help with? Thanks!