Forest Admin VS Preact

Forest Admin is an admin panel solution that saves your back-end engineers time and gives your operational teams more autonomy. Our highly customizable admin panel connects to your databases and APIs to ease your operations so that you can focus more on your business and less on backend operations.

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of Forest Admin.

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](https://www.forestadmin.com), 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 but allows you to have a dev workflow that works for collaborating with large dev teams on your admin panel. (+100 at our largest customer).

https://www.forestadmin.com https://www.gravitee.io/

I didn't have a spare node app sitting around, so I found Forest Admin. This is actually a cool product which provides the simplicity of dashboard tools like ActiveAdmin or Retool, but preserves the privacy of the data by having you self-host the backend. The backend exposes an API that is used by the frontend client, i.e. your browser, so data doesn't need to move through Forest Admin's servers. Here's a nice graphic to visualize how this works:

Disclaimer: I'm the founder of (Forest Admin)[https://www.forestadmin.com].

Wow, I'm impressed by the number of solutions out there. Back at the beginning of Forest Admin, we were alone on the market, which is generally not a good sign. But our perseverance paid off, and it was definitely worth it in the end!

Alright, so why Forest Admin? :)

Because we only focus on the admin panel use case. Not the entire internal tools world. In this way, we are able to provide a fully-featured SaaS Admin panel out of the box. No need to build it, nor with code, nor with low/no code tools.

Even if your app, internal processes and so your admin panel is specific, we have designed our solution accordingly with 2 things that are part of our DNA from the beginning:

1/ We generate all the backend code required to an admin panel. All CRUD routes, filtering & search, dashboarding, permissions, etc. Everything is automatically generated in a few seconds based on datasource introspection. In the end, the generated code is just a standard REST API, so you can extend/override it without any limitations.

2/ We pre-built the admin UI with every admin standard features available out of the box, with a big focus on providing a great UI/UX possible for operational people. We obviously also provide all the low/no code features to customize pretty much anything. We also provide a feature called "Workspace" (which is generally the core of what our competitors do) that allow users build custom views using drag'n'drop of UI components from scratch.

For home-lab/internal UIs, you can go a long way with the auto-generated model-admin pages from Django. If you just need CRUD and actions triggered on a list of models, you can typically avoid any UI work and just define a few Admin classes, and if you need to make custom forms it's quite easy using Django's templating machinery to override individual pages.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/ref/contrib/admin/

A similar modular admin system that's more generic is https://www.forestadmin.com/, I think this one has a layout editor too. But that one requires a REST API and so it may require more plumbing, depending on what you've already built. Or it could fit nicely on top of what you already have, if you already have APIs for everything.

In this blog, we'll see how to build a CRUD app with Forest Admin. We'll assume you're building a CRUD app for a PostgreSQL database.

At Forest Admin, we build admin panels for which we need to compute and cache large JSON documents. These documents are stored in redis and retrieved from this storage in order to be as fast as possible.

At Forest Admin, we recently faced this issue to move data from a Postgresql database to ElasticSearch.

In this post, we get to know more about Preact, one of this year's trending libraries. And we'll compare it to React to see which one suits better for our projects.

Similarly to Promises/A+, this effort focuses on aligning the JavaScript ecosystem. If this alignment is successful, then a standard could emerge, based on that experience. Several framework authors are collaborating here on a common model which could back their reactivity core. The current draft is based on design input from the authors/maintainers of Angular, Bubble, Ember, FAST, MobX, Preact, Qwik, RxJS, Solid, Starbeam, Svelte, Vue, Wiz, and more…

Those who want to develop a library that can be used by any other reactive framework. I often see SignalLike type that tries to subtype it.

https://github.com/preactjs/preact/blob/757746a915d186a90954...

The official Preact documentation.

At the very bottom of the image, there are 3 blocks that I chose to call application components. If you are building a cross-framework library, these can be built with whatever tools you want! Only catch is, all the tools you use to build it, will be needed by everyone consuming it. So choose wisely, and be mindful of how many kilobytes of third party code you will need in order to ship. In Schedule-X, I chose to use Preact. You will probably be fine with most lightweight virtual DOM libraries, and just like with frameworks there are a few to pick from.

>> React is not traditionally used for making games, but that's part of the fun and the challenge. R

> MS Flight Simulator cockpits are built with MSFS Avionics Framework which is React-like and MIT licensed:

https://github.com/microsoft/msfs-avionics-mirror/tree/main/...

preactjs may or may not be faster: https://preactjs.com/

Million.js is faster than preact, and lists a number of references under Acknowledgements: https://github.com/aidenybai/million#acknowledgments

https://million.dev/docs :

> We use a novel approach to the virtual DOM called the block virtual DOM. You can read more on what the block virtual DOM is with Virtual DOM: Back in Block and how we make it happen in React with Behind the block().*

React API reference > Components > Profiler:

DEV is a Rails monolith, which uses Preact in the front-end using islands architecture. The reason why I mention all this is that it's not a full-stack JavaScript application, and there is no state management library like Redux or Zustand in use. The data store, for the most part on the front end, is all data attributes.