SPEC: Developer UI

[cblanquera]

Summary

Developer GUI to model data and to automatically generate an admin and helpers for the front end.

Abstract

The following goals are intended to ultimately reduce the amount of development times needed to launch an app on incept by providing a graphical interface for developers to setup common things needed on most projects. Common things include the following.

• Design and develop database structures
• Authentication, roles and permissions
• Develop APIs like REST, webhooks, GraphQL and managing permissions
• Develop an administration dashboard for operations people
• Develop key performance indicators via charts, graphs and reports for business people

Motivation

Originating as far back as Drupal 6, tools like Firebase gave developers a user interface to configure their backend. Mixing this with library packages on npm, could reduce the amount of work developers need to input down to custom logic per project.

"The best code ever written is the one you never had to write." - Steve Jobs

Specification

Developers can simply include the admin as a plugin in incept.

# File:  ./plugin.json
["@inceptjs/admin"]

When first running incept dev or incept start, if @inceptjs/admin is added as a plugin it should ask the following configuration. Can manually call incept admin --type sql --name my_app --host localhost:3308 to do the same.

$ incept dev

What database ? [ sql, mongo ]
What is the name of your database ? 
Where is your database hosted ? 
Where is your database user ? 
Where is your database password ? 
...
Installed !
Next go to `http://localhost:3000/admin`
Login: admin
Password: admin 

This should populate an .env file or make a JSON in config/.

Considerations

Most Jamstack platforms focus on static site generation, avoiding working with data stores and becoming a full stack solution.