Besides, EEEY-vo is more fun to say than UH-vo.
TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's toolbox.”
Earnestly, I wish you well. These are rather bold claims.
I feel a little bit like Taylor Otwell in the old days when he was telling people about Laravel, or Evan You back in the day when you'd search for "JS framework" and you'd only get React and Angular.
They were on the verge of something new and useful, but nobody believed. I think developers, in general, are pretty inflexible when it comes to new things (only my oppinion), that's why I wanted to add those.
It's obvious that Avo is not the silver bullet for any app and has caveats in some scenarios. All tools do (Rails, Laravel, NextJS, django, spring, you fill in the rest), but for most apps it really does give you superpowers. You build apps 10x faster and the maintenance work is second to none. And in the end, you get a beautiful app ready to present to your customers or team.
Thank you for the encouragement! I need it :)
The fact that the ways to customize/escape are “vanilla rails” and avo is deployed within my app as an engine, make this very very interesting.
As compared to:
* something like retool which is deployed (ie hosted) as an additional layer which calls an api my app exposes. Great for huge organizations, but overkill for a small team (similar to SPA vs Hotwire tradeoff)
* activeadmin where escaping the standard path is extremely hard. Not to mention it’s built on gems which are no longer in favor (inherited resources, etc)
* administrate which I really enjoyed, but felt like the support/roadmap was more of a side project vs an “open core/commercial offering”
Looking forward to see what you're going to build, and get in touch with me on Discord or Twitter.
I've worked in the industry for a while and admin pages / reports usually being at least 50% of the effort. Sometimes, it's more like 90%.
So, there's a lot of potential impact there.
We'd build it for customer 1, and then for customer 2 we'd add some features and change some. Same for customer 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. After a few years we ended up with 10 different apps that should be the same. No documentation, sometimes the developer that worked on the app is no longer with the company, a real mess.
This way, it would be like using Rails. Documentation, release, maintenance, the whole shebang!
Thanks for sharing!
[0] https://twitter.com/avo_hq [1] https://avo.cool/chat [2] https://github.com/avo-hq/avo [3] https://twitter.com/adrianthedev
They are tools that work together nicely. I use both on our infrastructure websites (https://avohq.io). Jumpstart is an amazing starter app that gives you accounts, billing, notifications, and others, and with Avo you can take over and build your admin panel/back-office fast!
I've spoken with Chris Oliver and started work on adding Avo to Jumpstart and to have it as an alternative to rails_admin.
I'm humbled to have built something that could ship with Jumpstart. Thank you for the kind words!
Jumpstart is an amazing starter kit (starter kit doesn't do it justice) that gives you accounts, billing, notifications, etc. and Avo takes it over and gives you the ability to build your admin panel/back-office fast AF. It's like you replace rails_admin from Jumpstart.
I've spoken with Chris Oliver and started work on adding Avo to Jumpstart and to have it as an alternative to rails_admin.
Some did migrations from their own custom admin panels "over a weekend". It's kind of crazy how easy it is to get started.
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 a few days, if not weeks.
Avo is suited to agencies that build a lot of products for their clients and need to move fast and have a beautiful and robust UI, indie developers trying to test out their ideas fast, technical teams in companies of all sizes that need to build internal tools based on Ruby, and start-ups.
Avo runs on top of Ruby on Rails, which is a powerhouse of a framework and uses the most modern tech stack (Hotwire, TailwindCSS, esbuild).
Avo has three main parts that you can choose from:
1. The CRUD UI
2. The Dashboards UI
3. The custom content
The CRUD UI is not something generated that takes maintenance in the long run. Instead, it's a familiar Ruby DSL that's easy to extend with Rails code if you need to break away from it. It features about 30 fields with more advanced ones like (one-liner) file uploads, WYSIWYG, and key-value fields.
The Dashboards are a light layer on top of chartkick where one can query the data from the DB or an endpoint and quickly show the data in metrics, charts, or custom partials.
The Custom Content part is the secret sauce of Avo. It enables the developer to extend it even further using regular Rails code. You get access to partials, controller, action, params, and anything else you need to bring your own logic into the UI on every level (field, resource, tool).
Avo has a free Community version that features the powerful CRUD UI, and a paid Pro version for those who need more power and custom content. We also provide technical support for enterprise-like customers.
I know that Rails devs will immediately think of Active Admin, administrate, and other similar projects, and I want to mention that Avo is not them. It's built on a modern stack, and its mission is to become the back-office app and not just an "obscure admin panel that only the core team visits". I don't want to seem harsh, but I challenge non-believers to give Avo an hour of their time to see how it's different.
TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's toolbox.
I'm here to answer all of your questions.
Thank you