Thanks! To answer with respect to Retool directly, we actually wrote that up a bit here https://www.cloudwright.io/blog/retool-backend -- the short answer is, Retool is great for putting together UIs and database queries, but our focus is on the backend. One of the things we want is to make it easy to put together robust, lightweight APIs, with more complexity or connection requirements than you can embed in a frontend.
We also aim to be an easy way to set up scheduled or programmatic jobs -- stuff like scheduled file transfers or email notifications, where the primary interface isn't a web UI (when you aren't monitoring, developing, or debugging)
That makes perfect sense -- for a lot of the use-cases that I've experienced, I would have wanted to either hook the interface ('trigger button', 'view past runs' or similar) into an existing app or just iframe-d in your solution to that piece.
Sounds really interesting -- I think we'll give it a go.
We also aim to be an easy way to set up scheduled or programmatic jobs -- stuff like scheduled file transfers or email notifications, where the primary interface isn't a web UI (when you aren't monitoring, developing, or debugging)