ActiveAdmin VS Arbre

Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin?

At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do that, and the Active Admin is nice to have but I wouldn't say "tremendous value".

Github Link : https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin

for those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre)

Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/.

Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/?

We briefly considered migrating to a full-grown Rails admin interface, such as ActiveAdmin, RailsAdmin, Administrate or Avo. We especially liked Avo which is built on a very modern stack similar to ours (Tailwind + Hotwire + ViewComponents). In the end, we didn’t go this route as we found some of the options a bit too restrictive (even though Avo is very flexible) and we did not feel like trying to amend it to our needs. For example, Avo renders forms in a 1-field-per-row layout while we wanted something more similar to the Tailwind UI Stacked form layout. Nevertheless, we found a great deal of inspiration in the Avo code and its design principles.

I second Rails. It's incredibly polished and has really good gems to speed up dev. ActiveAdmin is a great gem if you need to quickly make an admin dashboard. It was useful when I had a small consultancy.

https://activeadmin.info/

See an example: https://activeadmin.info It provides a fast way to create back office functionality.

[1] https://activeadmin.info/

I can't speak much about Rails, as I've only played with it. But I've used a lot Django in the past.

Regarding the Django admin (in rails you have ActiveAdmin[1]) think if it just as a glorified database explorer. It is an internal tool for developers, product managers and maybe for your support team. It is in no way thought to be used by end users. Every attempt I've seen to use it as such was a catastrophic failure.

With Django, if you know plain HTML and CSS, with the tools I've mentioned in the comment you're responding to, you can build almost anything... For example, let's say you need a highly interactive client side table.... you can always just attach a Vue or a React component for it by using Unpoly compilers [2].

I'd say this stack is less useful the more your app needs to work fully offline... but if you don't have that constraint... I cannot think of anything that can't be built faster and safer.

[1] https://activeadmin.info/

[2] https://unpoly.com/up.compiler

Why use ActiveAdmin or RailsAdmin: Brick is not nearly as configurable -- at least yet! With Brick you can drop in your own model / controller / view template and it will use it, but on its own you can not change theming / use it to do templating tricks / etc. Currently working hard to arrive upon a straightforward and logical approach so that all of this will be possible. Looking into Arbre (used by ActiveAdmin) and Phlex for inspiration.

for those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre)

Like all Arbre components, our Admin::Components::HelloWorld inherits from Arbre::Component class: