Hi! Thanks for the comment. I'm an engineer as well, so the concerns you raise are things I've thought a lot about. I think Retool does a few things differently, which help:
1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing
2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.
3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.
They still can put git or something basic diffing logic in their SaaS backend and surface some simple GUI, I have done this before just by selecting the last entry, diffing it, and inserting a newer entry that subsumed the old database entry
Hi! I'm an engineer here at Retool. I actually did build just this (a basic diffing logic tool) not long ago. It's currently behind a beta flag, but I opened a PR up this morning to get this to ship to production.
If you're a Retool user you can find it under the Beta section in your org settings. And yes, this is available on our cloud offering
Nice. Yeah you guys have tried to recruit me more than once or twice ;) one thing I would strongly suggest as you roll it out is setting a retention policy and throttling/squashing diffs as you can have users that make lots of edits and it can take up a lot of data and become hard to follow the logs for the end users! Great work coming up with this pragmatic solution, best of luck with the rollout, and congrats to the team!
1. On We allow you to sync all your applications to Git. All Retool apps just JSON, and we serialize that to YAML (that has pretty diffs). So when you make changes to your application, those changes can be synced directly to your Git repository, and you can use code reviews, PRs, etc. in order to manage everything. This means we also support code transforms (if you want to bulk-change Retool applications), support staging and dev environments, and more. https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing
2. On the flexibility side — you can import your own React components. This lets you use the data-handling layers of Retool, but still customize the front-end as much as you want: https://docs.retool.com/docs/custom-react-components.
3. Most serious Retool users host Retool on-prem: https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions. By hosting Retool on-prem, you can be responsible for Retool's up-time. And because all updates are shipped via Docker, you can always downgrade / refuse to upgrade.