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Ask HN: Any reason why TUI aren't more used as internal tools?

4 points by dgan ↗ HN
I see no point in developing Web interfaces for internal company needs. TUI are cross platform, are obviously interactive, update-able in real time if needed, just like a web application.

I am proposing this because in our place we are constantly in a lack of a front developers to actually implement interfaces for outside public, so there is no way we can get one assigned for internal needs.

While creating TUIs is simple, and can be done by a backend dev without descending into the hellpit of yarn, node, npm; or even learning Django which looks like an overkill

4 comments

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ckluis
I think because there are very good UI based solutions like - https://www.appsmith.com (open source version of retool).
dgan
Mehh, this cannot be a general reason. I have never heard of that tool, and I bet nobody in my company neither. This still requires Javascript as it says on the main page, and I am not in the mood to learn Javascript
raviparikh
I've seen several companies build a Slack bot as a sort of "command line" like internal tooling system. We did this at my previous company. Like you said, it's easy for a backend dev to spin up Slack (text)-based internal tools easily. It works pretty well for many use cases, though it is suboptimal for things that really do require a UI (eg an internal tool that needs to display graphs).

After I left my previous company, I created a SaaS (https://www.airplane.dev/) that makes creating these kinds of internal tools pretty easily. If you write pure backend code/Python scripts/SQL/etc, Airplane will auto-generate the corresponding UI and also allow execution through a Slack bot.