django-sql-dashboard VS govuk-form-builder

I have a sister project to Datasette called Django SQL Dashboard which works against PostgreSQL databases: https://django-sql-dashboard.datasette.io

It used Django for the authentication layer but can otherwise work against any PostgreSQL database.

I partly built it to help explore what Datasette could look like if it expanded to work with more databases than SQLite. That's still something I'm considering doing in the future, via a plugin hook, but it's not on my short-term roadmap.

Reusable apps do exist (I released one myself a few months ago, https://django-sql-dashboard.datasette.io) but in most projects apps are single-use only - at which point they become little more than a code organization tool.

I use documentation systems that publish the documentation from the repo to a website. Most of my projects use Sphinx and reStructuredText for this, but I recently tried MyST (Markdown for Sphinx) and I like that a lot.

Some examples:

- https://docs.datasette.io serves documentation from https://github.com/simonw/datasette - which has documentation unit tests here: https://github.com/simonw/datasette

- https://django-sql-dashboard.datasette.io/ serves from markdown in https://github.com/simonw/django-sql-dashboard - I don't have documentation unit tests for that yet

Weirdly my Django SQL Dashboard project fits the bill a bit here: you can build up a "dashboard" (which is a tiny bit notebook-like if you squint at it the right way) with multiple SQL queries on it, and save that either as a bookmark or as a "saved dashboard" with a URL.

https://django-sql-dashboard.datasette.io/

In my own work I've been using it for the kind of things that I would normally use a Jupyter notebook for - gathering together research on problems I'm trying to solve.

It's hand-written CSS - there's not much of it: https://github.com/simonw/django-sql-dashboard/tree/01bb7e60...

I've been building a tool for this over the past couple of months called Django SQL Dashboard - it currently only works with PostgreSQL and you need to create a read-only database connection, but it then provides an interface for executing any bookmarking SQL queries plus some basic visualizations: https://github.com/simonw/django-sql-dashboard

I build and maintain some libraries that are used by teams working on GOV.UK projects in Rails. Have been inundated with offers since their release, and they've gone on to be used in some fairly high profile things.

https://github.com/x-govuk/govuk-form-builder

This is my side project, I'm a dev currently contracting at DfE. This library and the form builder[0] make working with the design system easier for Rails devs.

[0] https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/

If you dig around on GitHub you'll see most government departments have an organisation where they publish stuff. For example, here's the MoJ, DfE, Cabinet Office.

This is definitely the best approach in my opinion, providing the people writing the docs are capable of contributing directly.

One of my projects[0] builds and deploys a static documentation site[1] on every push to master. The static site generator (Nanoc, in this case) then pulls in the library and uses it to publish its own documentation. All the examples are snippets of code[2] that are both displayed as-is and eval'd into the final output.

The guide can never be out of sync with the library.

[0] https://github.com/dfe-digital/govuk_design_system_formbuild...

[1] https://govuk-form-builder.netlify.app/

[2] https://github.com/DFE-Digital/govuk_design_system_formbuild...