[rubyist5eva]

We evaluated trying to use appsmith for replacing our handmade admin panel but doing things like setting up pagination for databases was not particularly pleasant, basically writing raw sql with template strings. Yuck.

Our app would’ve needed a bunch of new apis added to it to make it workable that we just weren’t willing to invest in at the time so we’re sticking with our plain html pages and smatteringgs of js for now.

[yen789]

Have you tried Forest Admin? It generates an admin panel based on your data, and features like pagination, search, dashboards, etc. are available out-of-the-box. It's way faster than building from scratch and even with low-code. It's also secure, FA can't access user data.

[rubyist5eva]

Never heard of it but will check it out

[mohanarpit]

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of Appsmith.

Thanks for evaluating the product. I appreciate it.

The reason we allow users to write raw SQL within Appsmith is because it is geared to build dashboards and admin panels in scenarios where you don't have or don't want to write API layers on your database yet. Hence, this gives our users a balance of easy to start with & configurable to extend.

You can always start with raw SQL queries and upgrade to APIs whenever you have them ready. Since access control is in-built within the product, your queries are never exposed to users and are safe against any SQL injections as well.

Having said that, I totally understand if a low code product like Appsmith doesn't fit your needs today. I hope some day you'll have a use case that we can help with. :)

[rubyist5eva]

Thanks for the response.

We considered starting with the raw queries and adding apis later, but unfortunately it just didn't make sense for us as it was ultimately less effort to just use our existing SSR rails views and we wouldn't have to dedicated more resources to augmenting internal tools even more, or managing the extra infrastructure needed for appsmith (hosted solution on other infrastructure was not an option unfortunately) - we don't use mongodb so adding it (for the appsmith datastore) to our infra was not something we really wanted to do either.

We did decide to revisit in the future as we are building some distributed services and appsmith might be a better fit then when we need to build a unified UI for all of our services.