Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat. I am the cofounder of Budibase - an open source alt to Retool, Mendix, Outsystems - and have been building it for around 2 years now.

It's an incredible space and solves a burning problem for engineers, IT teams and business users.

We're seeing major benefits of being open source, with the like of the NHS, Amazon, Deloitte and other major orgs choosing Budibase over proprietary alternatives, so I would say your decision to offer self-hosting was a good one.

As much as we are probably seen as competitors, I wish you well and I am happy to share notes if you would like a call?

https://github.com/Budibase/budibase

> Wow! Building this in 7 weeks is an incredible feat.

Here is an analysis of Tooljet development in the last 90 days

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...

I also did one for budibase as well

https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?q=wind...

Disclaimer: I'm the creator of GitSense

Hi there, nice site.

I'm really like this combined side scrolling table + graph component you use on the pulse page. Looking at the source I see a mention of echarts in the html but I don't think I've seen anything like that in their examples.

Did you build this yourself as a custom rendered chart or is this something that someone else built?

All the charts are by echarts. For the timeline chart (the one in the pulse view) think of it as a scatter chart that is zoomed in. echarts provides labels and drawing lines and other things which is how I was able to create the timeline chart.

Nice! GitSense is really cool. I recently enjoyed this dashboard [0], which is more basic and focused on tracking project popularity. Is there a way for me to add Lowdefy [1] to GitSense?

[0] - https://osschott.metabaseapp.com/public/dashboard/ece8baa7-7... [1] - https://github.com/lowdefy/lowdefy

I've added lowdefy to GitSense and depending on how big the repository is, indexing can take minutes to hours to complete. Having said that, the public version of GitSense is scrubbed from time to time since it is still in Beta, so I can't guarantee that it will be there after the next scrubbing.

You can install GitSense on your own infrastructure like your laptop if you want, but the license file will time out after 30 days. Once GitSense is out of Beta and I'm properly funded, I want to make GitSense free to use forever for small instances and opensource.

GitSense seems very useful. Constructive feedback about the UI: replace the (straggler?) serif font with the sans serif font you're using elsewhere on the page

Thanks for the feedback. I'm the sole founder behind GitSense and to be honest, there are too many stragglers and things I should have done better. It's just that my time is pulled in so many different directions, with the business side of things occupying most of it right now.

Thanks for commenting and yeah I do want to ensure everything is sans serif. I think I get a pass though, since I do have the beta label on the tool :-)

Awesome tool. Have you considered adding support/analytics around Github discussions?

I actually want to index everything in the software development lifecycle, which will include GitHub discussions. The issue right now is I'm a sole founder and I can only implement so many features and I am looking for investors right now (ping me if you think you can help with introductions) to tackle what you suggested.

I really do want to index everything from meetings, emails, time between design docs and so forth. Indexing GitHub discussions is very important since it takes effort to engage people and I want to best capture effort so that developers can say "1 line of code" took more effort than you can imagine.

Awesome. It's a big task, and I wish you all the best. Not sure I can help with investors though.

Why no LoC included, it seems most useful metric. Also bugs filed/fixed would be helpful too.

Thank you for your effort!

> Why no LoC included

LoC invokes PTSD for many developers and I honestly want to do it right, which will take a bit effort and thinking on my part. For example, when providing LoC, I want to be able to break it down into useful information like (isolated code, used here and there) and so forth.

I want LoC to help us understand the significance of going from one revision to another, so that LoC can be used to help us drive actionable insights.

Edit: Just realized I never addressed your other points which is I do want to index and provide insights into everything in the software development lifecycle, it's just that I'm bound by resource constraints right now.

Thanks :)

Sure, would love to talk. Please send me an email so that we can schedule a call. ( navaneeth@tooljet.io )

Would you two be able to share some take-aways from that conversation at some point? Maybe write up a short comparison of the projects as they are now and any differences in roadmap/vision that could be relevant.

I always appreciate when OSS projects put in effort to understand and position themselves in relation to competitors (or potential collaborators).

Also want to mention some open-source React visual drag and drop page editors that might be useful for inspiration or to eliminate possible duplicate work. There's OpenChakra [0] and Blocks [1], which are apps, and then there's craft.js, a library that aims to modularize "the building blocks of a page editor" and seems to have more emphasis on customizing the actual editor UI.

Best of luck to you both!

[0] https://github.com/premieroctet/openchakra [1] https://github.com/blocks/blocks [2] https://github.com/prevwong/craft.js

awesome. I'll ping you later

I have to say I was very impressed when I tried out Budibase and was able to create a CRUD app out of the box without looking at docs. You guys are easier to use than Retool — and self hostable/open source!!

i have no idea what it's like to work on this problem for 2 years but really looking forward to see what you become. the youtube updates are super helpful btw pls keep that up

Appreciate your feedback. With the latest release, we're in a much better position to release quicker, and communicate better.

We're still in beta, and yet to launch to Hackernews, PH, etc, so looking forward to that over the next few months.

I've been playing with this for a little while now, really like the fact this takes over a lot of the management issues as well like handling email templating and all those nitty gritty bits that would otherwise be a pain!

Looking forward to seeing where this goes over the next while!

Thanks for the feedback. Our latest release has received great feedback to date. There are a lot of IT professionals out there who don't want to deal with onboarding, adding/removing users and forgot password flows.

I'd love to hear more about your use cases if you have the time:

calendly.com dash budibase

I'll get in touch, thanks!

Hey! I've been following Budibase too You're doing great too.

I want to do implementations for projects like this and trainings around it. There is so much power in these tools its amazing.

Can we talk too? andrew AT amescher.com

Hey - of course we can. I'll email you ASAP

Would this be considered product thread hijacking? The 'compliment' could also be interpreted as a disguised subtle diss (7wk product vs 2yr one)..

It's not a diss. It is a compliment.

This looks cool. What did you use to generate the documentation? https://docs.tooljet.io/docs/intro/

Looks like Docusaurus.

Check out Wappalyzer[0], it's an open source plug-in that tells you what technologies a website is using.

0. https://github.com/AliasIO/wappalyzer

Docusaurus - It's easy to customise and good enough even without customisations.

This looks very interesting... But no tests?

I'm not 100% happy with a project at work, where we're building out a jsonapi from a legacy rails app (part rewrite in-place, part move to react for front-end) - and after setting it up rswag with integration tests generating swagger schemas has been pretty nice. Not quite decided on what I think about activemodel::serializer... But it mostly works, without too much tweaking.

I've also adopted some ideas from:

https://github.com/guillaumebriday/jsonapi-scopes

For filtering/sorting - I think something like it should be in rails, really.

Rswag: https://github.com/rswag/rswag

Rswag looks cool, will try it out. There are tests for rails controllers and I have recently setup Cypress for component testing, will be focusing on tests the coming days.

> There are tests for rails controllers

I only found one:

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/test/control...

The others appear to be empty scaffolds (which imnho is worse than no tests, really), eg:

https://github.com/ToolJet/ToolJet/blob/develop/test/control...

  require "test_helper"

  class FoldersControllerTest < ActionDispatch::IntegrationTest
    # test "the truth" do
    #   assert true
    # end
  end

Same for empty model tests etc - I'd strongly encourage removing them - as they just add noise.

Btw, if not doing tdd, time is probably better spent on integration tests than controller/model tests. Main challenge I've found with rails projects that were put in use with no tests, is there's a big effort to set up test data/fixtures from scratch. One option can sometimes be to just set up a test database with real data (database dump as a fixture).

> and I have recently setup Cypress for component testing

That's nice, and probably a good focus for a project like this.

Ed: as for mocking/integration testing apis - which might be useful here, there's "vcr": https://github.com/vcr/vcr

Appsmith is also open source, but this looks great. Can't believe you knocked it out in 7 weeks.

Same here, the website and product looks impressive. @navaneethpk how many hours a day have you been coding? Do you use some ready templates or boilerplates?

8-10 hours a day :) Using Tabler for builiding the user interface helped me speed up the development.

Can you give a brief breakdown of what features are the same between ToolJet and a service like Retool, what features are different, which ones are intentionally left out, and how close to feature parity you're hoping to get?

There are many similar features such as: a) The ability to fetch & merge data from multiple data sources b) Widgets such as tables, charts & forms

The goal is to build more connectors and widgets while ignoring features that will not makes sense for majority of the users. Example of a feature that's intentionally left out (for now) is the schema browser for databases.

Also, thanks for pointing out the typo, fixed it :)

Impressive amount of work for 7 weeks! Looking forward to trying it out, super welcome tool!

It demonstrates what a skilled Rails developer can achieve by himself. It’s not a surprise that so many successful startups are still built with Ruby on Rails regularly.

That is a very great job. Congrats! My feedback is to make it flexible on charts and easy to create admin panels.

Any ideas how you will differentiate yourself from Appsmith? (which looks similar but more developed)