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!
TBH, I believe Avo is the secret weapon in any developer's toolbox.”
Earnestly, I wish you well. These are rather bold claims.