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omeraplak | 2 years ago

Here's what sets Refine apart: we're all about getting hands-on with the code, rather than relying solely on drag-and-drop like some other tools do, such as Retool, Appsmith, Tooljet, Budibase, and others. Instead of just giving you a set of pre-made building blocks, Refine goes the extra mile and creates a complete React project for you. This project comes packed with useful hooks and providers that make your work smoother.

We also have this 'headless' feature that lets developers seamlessly blend in their favorite UI framework or their own custom designs without any hassle. This flexibility is particularly great for things like complex admin panels, SAAS interfaces, and B2B portals. On the other hand, if you're working on simpler tools for internal use – you know, the ones that don't need a lot of tweaking – Refine might offer more complexity than necessary.

discuss

verdverm|2 years ago

low-code doesn't necessarily mean drag-n-drop, though that is typically the association in people's minds

To us, low-code is really about creating simpler, or higher up the logical stack, abstractions, and then generating the implementation.

Our take is not so far off from yours, where we take a code first approach. Users declaratively define their application in CUE and then get most of the code. Rather than providing hooks, we let the user write directly in the output code. Unlike Refine, we enable our tool to continue to aid the developer beyond the initial scaffold phase, allowing things like the data model to update and the user gets new database migrations to be auto-generated and applied. We also make it really easy for anyone to create and share these application blueprints or generators (as we call them).

In this way, the user can select any mix of technology and make starterkits or addons for any application, not just webapps. For example we have users (ops team) injecting and maintaining CI & k8s files into their service fleets (dev team). This is a case where we see low-code, as a term, more generally.

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof