ActiveAdmin VS CanCanCan

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

https://github.com/CanCanCommunity/cancancan (Ruby on Rails ABAC) Same like casl.js, but for Ruby on Rails! Casl.js was actually inspired and modeled by cancancan.

For authorization, I'm going back and forth with Pundit and CanCanCan

This code mounts the Flipper UI at the /flipper endpoint in your application. The RoleConstraint class is used to restrict access to the UI to users who have the manage role. You can customize this constraint to suit your specific needs. In this case, we're using the CanCanCan gem to gate specific routes to admin users. If you haven't worked with CanCanCan before, ignore the RoleConstraint portion.

Would you do : 1. a roles table with the name of the role and 64 booleans? 2. A roles table with one JSON field? (using rails json data type) 3. A roles table and a permissions table, similar do what is suggested in the cancancan developpers guide:

Expressing authorization rules can be a bit challenging with the use of other authorization gems, such as pundit or cancancan. The resource_policy gem provides a more concise and expressive policy definition that uses a simple block-based syntax that makes it easy to understand and write authorization rules for each attribute.

https://github.com/CanCanCommunity/cancancan (Ruby on Rails ABAC) Same like casl.js, but for Ruby on Rails! Casl.js was actually inspired and modeled by cancancan.

In production code you would most likely use a library for access control, such as CanCanCan

PS If you do mobile / web work (or something else with "detached" UI), I find that declarative access control rules are far superior to imperative ones, because they can be serialized and shipped over the wire. For example, backend running cancancan can be easily send the same rules to casl on the frontend, while if you used something like pundit to secure your backend, you either end up re-implementing it in the frontend, or sending ton of "canEdit" flags with every record.

You can use a gem like cancancan (https://github.com/CanCanCommunity/cancancan )to manage authorization, and its helpers to show stuff based on what a user can do