ActiveAdmin VS Yii2

Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails.

But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks:

1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See https://www.reddit.com/r/ruby/comments/105sdax/whats_the_lat... for a discussion.

2. The lack of static typing meant far less IDE support. Fewer documentation tooltips, less autocompletion, etc.

3. I used to do a lot of Rails consulting. And whenever I had to drop into a codebase with more than 50,000 lines or 5 active developers, it was generally a painful slog. Too many weird Rails plugins that stopped being maintained, too much magic, too many nasty surprises while refactoring.

Basically, smaller Rails projects were an absolute delight. Larger Rails projects, though, tended to feel more like a swamp. Tools like https://activeadmin.info/ could tip the balance where applicable.

I still think that small Rails projects are fantastic, and I don't think anything since has remotely matched Rails' productivity within that niche. There's just too much mature tooling, and much of it works together seamlessly. But not too many projects want classic multi-page apps right now, and small projects often grow up to be big projects.

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/

Yii is one of the oldest PHP frameworks, acronym as Yes It Is! It has 14.2k stars and 7k forks on GitHub. It is a fast, secure, and flexible PHP framework for web development, especially for building MVC architecture websites. It is an Object-Oriented PHP framework that requires knowledge of inheritance, polymorphism, etc.

In Yii Framework we have a middleware that will allow us to access our applications without the need to point the web server to the public directory of each template, so we will use the middleware SubFolder::class.

asset-packagist: This is the traditional Yii2 way, here we will add the following to our composer.json.

It is often preferable to manage Yii Assets programmatically. For example, when you use the widget in a page, it will automatically include the required css and javascript files, instead of asking you to manually find these files and include them. And when you upgrade the widget to a new version, it will automatically use the new version of the Yii Assets. In this tutorial, we will describe the powerful Yii Assets management capability provided in Yii Framework .

As we can see in the example above, we have defined the configuration of our packages in files .php (it doesn’t matter if they are YiiFramework packages or not), this allows us to define the configuration of each component in a very simple way to understand.

Now if we want to create an extension, under the code standard used in the Yii Framework v.3 packages, we can use yiisoft/template, provides us the tools necessary for our code to comply with good coding standards they are:

Now we understand how to do any configuration of any YiiFramework package or external, it is not necessary to have a single long and complex configuration file, we can organize it according to the group of configurations and Yii config will do the work for you, as well as the container it applies the definitions for you, with the automatic wiring facility in controllers, which makes it easy to access any container dependency without the need to use static access to it, or depend on the container itself.