Awesome
List of ways to get a web GUI for a database
This is an opinionated list.
I would like to develop a new web application.
Here I am listing tools to develop a web applications. This helps me to structure my research.
My Background
I develop Django applications since 2008, this means 12 years.
Django is great, and it is mature. I love the language Python.
But time has changed. Maybe it is time to switch?
Database
At the heart of every web application is a database.
I worked with CSV files, sqlite, ZODB (an object oriented database for Python), MongoDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL.
My favorite database is PostgreSQL.
Frontend
Sending HTML over the wire is still very common. There are many productive applications created with Django, PHP, Rails, ...
This way is perfectly fine. There are tools to help you to write modern application this way. A list of JS libraries which help here are on my HTML over the wire page.
But new applications get usualy build with Angular, React or Vue these days.
At the moment I would choose Vue. But this is not settled yet.
If I go the JSON-over-the-wire approach, I need a way to get an http API for my data inside PostgreSQL.
What kind of http API?
Again, I am open minded and not settled yet.
Here are some required features:
- The API should have a parsable description, so that introspection is possible.
OK, up to now I only have this requirement.
This means it could be:
PostgREST
Provides OpenAPI via a thin wrapper written in Haskel.
Django Rest Framework
DRF provides OpenAPI (See Schemas)
django-restql provides GraphQL
Prisma 2
But somehow I am unsure if this is cool. Very young (started 2019, after Prisma1 and Graphcool).
Works for several databases, not just PG.
Provides ORM, not OpenAPI or GraphQL.
Hasura
Since 2018
Looks good.
Implemented in Haskel+JS.
PostGraphile
PostGraphile Instant GraphQL API
Since 2016
Implemented in JS+Typescript.
Conclusion
I think I will keep it simple and use Django together with plain JavaScript without a framework. Dead simple: Send HTML from the server to the client. Maybe I will use Bootstrap.