Launch HN: Refine (YC S23) – Open-source platform for enterprise web apps
I am a bit confused by these tools. Can someone analogize what they are doing here? It somehow reminds me of the Django admin capabilities but expanded to any Typescript base technologies?I have trouble wrapping my head around the use case for this. Is the target market existing businesses that already have APIs (probably as REST services), maybe some databases and they just want to quickly wire up some UI to it? It seems a bit heavy handed for writing an entire application.I can imagine maybe a medium sized business where the data science, sales, marketing, customer service etc. teams want some access to the production system data in a format other than Tableau or Microsoft BI. And perhaps their engineering team is entirely focused on product development or operations and so no significant resources can be allocated. I guess this might allow more junior or jack-of-all-trades engineers to whip up basic admin features?To be honest, even in small startups I've worked at, cranking out admin dashboards using React was just so trivial that I can't imagine paying to make it slightly easier. And looking at their code examples, it doesn't seem all that more simple. I suppose there maybe some goldilocks zone between startups that just crank that kind of stuff out and huge enterprises where entire teams exist to manage internal tools. In that zone perhaps having these kinds of platforms can expedite internal tooling creation.