react-admin VS pocketbase

> "Are there examples of companies adopting this model?"

Many examples across the industry:

- Autodesk AutoCAD (closed) + Plugins/Addons (many open)

- MS Windows (closed) + Many 3rd party programs (open)

- Github (closed) + Github Actions (open)

- Npm (closed) + Npm modules (mostly open)

> "What are the potential benefits or pitfalls?"

Benefits:

- Harder to replicate, the company gets to keep the "secret sauce" a secret

- Opening up a way to "extend" the platform means 3rd party developers add value to your system

- The core isn't open, so less effort is required to maintain compare to OpenSource

Pitfalls:

- Closed-source is hard to verify, company is essentially saying "trust me bro"

- Less innovation, as user's can't contribute to the core

> "How does it impact community engagement and software adoption?"

There's hardcore FOSS advocates that will hate anything not fully open. But a business has to make money and protect it's IP, having a "closed core" is one way to do that and ensure a sustainable business model.

Another approach is the opposite, open-core + closed-premium-addons. An example of this is "React Admin"

- Open Core -> https://github.com/marmelab/react-admin

- Premium Modules Offering -> https://react-admin-ee.marmelab.com/

Official Website: https://marmelab.com/react-admin/

React-Admin is a React-based frontend framework for building admin applications that talk to a backend data API. It offers a pluggable mechanism for easily adapting to the specific API style of your backend.

With these features, data fetching and forms become significantly easier to implement in React. However, creating a great user experience involves integrating all these hooks, which can be complex. Alternatively, you can use a framework like react-admin where user-friendly forms with optimistic updates are built-in.

31.react-admin

For the admin panel, or basically anything with basic crud operations, take a look at https://marmelab.com/react-admin/. Most frontend devs don't like it, since it limits you somewhat in customization, but at the same time, it is very easy to grasp for someone coming from a backend dev profile, who just wants a crud UI. It even has a guesser template that proposes an initial screen layout based on the response of your api, which you can then copy-paste and finetune. It is really made to make quick admin crud ui's.

We’ve developed a business based on an open-source platform called react-admin. Embracing the open-source spirit, we’re sharing the key performance indicators of this business. We hope it will help other open-source developers build their own business.

React-Admin: As the name suggests, this component library is targeted at building administrator interfaces for B2B (business-to-business), for example, managing users in your system. It is based on Material design and has a neat feature where you can let it “guess” your list views by providing a sample API endpoint for your data.

- We want a solution that creates CRUD (create, read, update, delete) quickly and requires minimal effort. - We want to be able to create some sort of complex interface if the task requires it. - We make cool, beautiful projects, so we want a visually pleasing solution. - We want the solution to be independent of the language on the back-end, because, for example, we started with PHP, Laravel, but over time node.js, Go appeared in the stack. In short, we want fast, beautiful and custom. We've had time to poke at various off-the-shelf solutions that we've been advised. They're good, but: - they are created specifically for some frameworks / languages like laravel, node.js - they can only generate CRUDs with a rigidly defined structure, where you can't implement or customize anything of your own. - they can't be styled Here's what we've been looking at Control Panels for Laravel: https://demo.backpackforlaravel.com/admin/dashboard Not a very pretty solution in our opinion. And the promo page has nice screenshots, not the demo "well such". https://orchid.software/en/ Not particularly functional, but neatly done https://nova.laravel.com They have a beautiful, but rigidly set strutkrua, you can not create castmon interfaces, stylize them. Just do CRUD and that's it. And it's paid https://filamentphp.com/ Analog to Nova, with essentially the same problems. For node.js: https://adminjs.co Nice promo, and the demo is way behind As standalone dashboards: https://strapi.io/ Very cool, but for other purposes. It's more of an entity builder with an interface and API https://pocketbase.io/ Similarly, it's an entity builder with an interface and API https://directus.io/ This is a backend builder. https://filamentphp.com/It is purely for php, you can't customize styles, you can't create your own interfaces. It is possible to create only tables and forms by template, and we remember that we want flexibility, independence from the language and the ability to create their own interfaces and customize them https://flatlogic.com This is also more of a backend builder. Direct competitors: https://github.com/refinedev/refine https://marmelab.com/react-admin/is probably the best solution that is currently on the market, they have been developing for a long time, they are our favorite. To the disadvantages we considered the following points: quite an old project, and somewhere the technology is already outdated, unsympathetic interface, old UI libraries. Huge documentation, it’s simply to create CRUD but hard to work without immersion. After all this there is only one conclusion: you need to do it yourself....

It's an obvious question, but have you looked into Pocketbase?

https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase

I'd like to plug PocketBase [0] for a similar use case.

Last week I was looking for a place to store random data with API access, and was looking at making a Google Sheets backend, but PocketBase was easy and didn't have a 60 rpm quota.

Deploying to a cheap VPS was very easy with CapRover.

[0] https://pocketbase.io/

What is Pocketbase? Pocketbase is an open-source backend solution offering a real-time database, file storage, and seamless user authentication with OAuth integration, all readily available right out of the box.

Browsing HN, GitHub and the like we get to see a huge variety of software products and code bases.

I often see products and think - if this product X, got together with Y, it would be pretty cool - kind of like if they had a kid together.

Not too literally, but more on the conceptual level - my level of programming is low.

E.g. Just some....

- pocketable.io & datasette (+with some more charting) [https://pocketbase.io, https://datasette.io]

I'm working on a personal project and found myself looking for an alternative to Postman/Insomnia this morning. This made me realize i've been using the same tools for so long for work (mobile development, finance) that this project may be a good time to try out some new things.

Here are a few tools that i've been using lately that I really enjoy:

https://pocketbase.io/ - A dead-simple self-hosted firebase/supabase-like "backend in a box" using golang and sqlite. So far i've been really impressed. I've gone the route of extending the base offering with more go code and am really enjoying the experience.

https://excalidraw.com/ - An open source whiteboarding tool. Slick to use and after learning some keybinds I've gotten pretty fast at throwing together diagrams to explain things to people on my team. The killer piece though is that the filetype is just json, so I can source control my diagrams. Even better, their "export to png" function has a box to embed the json data _into_ the png, allowing me to slap the diagram in places that only accept images (think confluence) and still be able to change the diagram later if needed. 10/10.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/ - Gitlab's CI/CD toolset is really impressive, and I've gotten really intimate with it's deeper features over the past year. I'd be curious though to hear from someone who's familiar with it vs it's competitors.

Is there an article somewhere, outside of the Pocketbase docs, presenting that pattern?

- https://github.com/pocketbase/pocketbase/blob/master/core/ap...