Hmm, I can't see the submission on https://news.ycombinator.com/show yet. Could be a sign most upvotes were not counted or the flagged-comment (brand new account who immediately praise how great something is) to upvote ratio is too high now. Best option is to submit again in a couple of hours, same title and text. Try first comment "author/maintainer/creator/team here, happy to answer questions" or a variation, that often works.
In 2016, I started working on Forest Admin with Hexa (eFounders).
I was asked 100 times a day about competitors and always replied, "only admin panels built internally." It was uncharted territory and honestly, it was frustrating.
Building a completely new product category is a rare luxury, and it can be scary, especially for investors. I was convinced that admin panels were one of the last pieces of the operational puzzle to be SaaS-ified.
Today, I discover new players every week, mainly in the internal tool market, which is close but very different from our mission at Forest Admin.
One of the most successful actors in recent years is Retool. I had the chance to meet David Hsu a while ago, and our discussions about how our respective companies shape the market were very interesting.
Naturally, I receive requests for explanations between Forest Admin and Retool every day.
I finally decided to write an article to explain the positioning of our two companies. Beyond comparing features, price, or anything likely to change over time, I decided to take a purely strategic positioning angle on the market and highlight our completely different but coherent long-term visions.
That's a really bold move, and what impresses me is not only the initiative, but the time they took to ride the wave of the positive outcome from the chaotic situation.
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!).
I recognized the name, thank you for jsonapi-serializer!
Any reason you’re not adding maintainers?
Feels sad that one of the most useful JavaScript JSON API spec libraries is dead for 2-3 years :( There are people lined up to support, fix and keep improving it.
