I'm a big fan of admin tools, they can be very useful in getting data into a database without SQL (in the beginning), providing product people with a handy interface to explore data (if they don't use tableplus[3]), allowing customer support to field customer inquires, potentially allowing QA teams to diagnose issues.
They can indeed be a pain to build if one puts in the same codebase as the product codebase, best to separate their code out into a separate codebase. Business logic is often not applied to admin tools hence better own codebase.
Recently I built a backend using Node-Red[0], being a card-carrying Emacs user, I was surprised how simple it was to design flows to represent an API for my application. But the really great advantage was the admin tool. I just used Node-Reds dashboard[1] to create a simple frontend to interface with my database. It allowed me to play around with my database schema until it felt usable. After that I designed the API.
Just one more plug: pgModeler[2] is terrific for visualling modelling a postgres database. Incredibly useful and much preferred (for me anyway) over codified migrations. Combined with Node-Red, I could focus on getting the business logic done and not fiddle around with database migrations, data format conversions or debugging code.
They can indeed be a pain to build if one puts in the same codebase as the product codebase, best to separate their code out into a separate codebase. Business logic is often not applied to admin tools hence better own codebase.
Recently I built a backend using Node-Red[0], being a card-carrying Emacs user, I was surprised how simple it was to design flows to represent an API for my application. But the really great advantage was the admin tool. I just used Node-Reds dashboard[1] to create a simple frontend to interface with my database. It allowed me to play around with my database schema until it felt usable. After that I designed the API.
Just one more plug: pgModeler[2] is terrific for visualling modelling a postgres database. Incredibly useful and much preferred (for me anyway) over codified migrations. Combined with Node-Red, I could focus on getting the business logic done and not fiddle around with database migrations, data format conversions or debugging code.
[0]=https://nodered.org [1]=https://github.com/node-red/node-red-dashboard [2]=https://pgmodeler.io/ [3]=https://tableplus.com/