[madarco]

I really love the breadth of Internal Admin tools that are available today, however, I feel like none has an even minimal support to proper dev flows like dev/staging/production or a way to synchronize releases between our own Backend API and the admin pages.

[shawiz]

Totally agree that developing in many no-code tools is frustrating since you can’t use the development workflows you’re used to in your own IDE. Retool Mobile was built as an alternative to react native that makes it easy for developers that know some JS/SQL to build native apps.

We focused a lot on development workflows like staging environments, versioning with Git, debug tools, monitoring with Datadog, etc. There are a few development workflows we can make even better because we own the run-time. For example with Mobile when you’re shipping a new update you can test on a staging environment, test the app directly on a device (vs emulators) and inspect issues with debug tools. Then when you’re ready you can push it live OTA so everyone is on the latest version.

Are there other development workflows that would be helpful for you? We’re investing a lot more here and would love any ideas

[raviparikh]

I cofounded Airplane.dev which you may want to look at. Everything you build in Airplane is normal JS/Python/React etc code that you can store in your codebase, version control, setup environments against, etc.

[asadlionpk]

How's airplane doing in this somewhat saturated market? Compared to heap, which did alright I guess (I used it for my prev gig, loved it).

[raviparikh]

We’re doing pretty well! The majority of people using Airplane aren’t comparing it to Retool or any other products, but rather to building internal tools in-house. Since Airplane takes a code-based approach there are lots of eng teams that try it out who would never otherwise consider the low-code/no-code platforms. So there’s a lot of addressable market.

Glad you liked Heap :) That was a much more crowded market!

[seyz]

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of https://www.forestadmin.com.

I couldn't agree more with this statement. The issue isn't that internal tool builders lack a feature to do it, I think the problem is deeper and comes from the way they are designed.

Most of them allow you to build the frontend (web or mobile here) without providing any backend code. They provide you with an integration library, whether it's connecting to a third-party SaaS or to your backend code. But that's where it ends.

With Forest Admin, we have a completely different architecture. All the backend code is automatically generated with the UI, allowing you to be up and running in a few minutes.

This has allowed us to provide a rich development workflow environment both on the backend (the code is yours and runs on your own machine, so you can use your Git without changing your habits) and on the frontend. This gives you the ability to fork a branch from your production environment to a dev environment, make your changes, merge them on a staging before pushing to prod, etc.

This command line is heavily inspired by Git, allowing you to have a development workflow that works in sync between backend code and frontend layout, enabling collaboration with large development teams on an admin panel (+100 devs for our largest customer!).