Show HN: Airplane Views – code-first platform for building internal UIs (opens in new tab)

Hi HN, I'm Josh, one of the founders of Airplane! Airplane Views is our take on building internal tool UIs and is the newest component of our platform (alongside Tasks and Workflows).

With Views, you can build admin dashboards, product usage charts, moderation inboxes, and more with just a few React components on a page. Views pair well with Tasks (our Lambda-like functions service)—you can write Tasks to fetch a list of customers or suspend a user, and hook them up to e.g. a Table or Button:

  import { Button, Stack, Table } from "airplane";
  
  const AdminPanel = () => (
    <Stack>
      <Table task="list_new_teams" />
      <Button task="suspend_user">Suspend</Button>
    </Stack>
  );

Internal tools tend to be under-invested yet power core parts of businesses. We want to help tools reach the same level of rigor as production software, and we believe using code is the right approach. Need to re-use some logic? Import it. Need a custom component? Build it yourself. Need to migrate off Airplane to your own system? We hope you don't, but you can refactor and reuse your existing code.

We think there are great low-code/no-code tools out there for building internal tools, but from our experience there have been few truly focused on developers. A lot of tools support e.g. writing JavaScript within a product, but we think being dev-focused goes beyond that:

- The core authoring flow should revolve around code. Views in Airplane are written in TS/JS, and Tasks support TS/JS, Python, Docker image, and shell scripts. You run airplane deploy from a CLI to, well, deploy it to Airplane.

- The tool should fit developer workflows. Develop locally, write tests, open a PR, push to deploy, promote to prod, etc. Someone shouldn't be able to break tools for the support team with a SQL typo.

- Plus, you can see how others have built things, remix examples, and share it back: https://github.com/airplanedev/templates

The challenge is making this easy to learn and use. We think Views will work because the surface area for internal tools is smaller. We can be more opinionated, and a design system is built-in. You can use Layout, Table, Form, and Chart and get 90% of the way there. We've put a lot of effort into our docs (docs.airplane.dev), although we still have ways to go. And we're working on making building easier: you'll soon be able to edit Views in your browser, and things like drag-and-drop builders can be later layered on top.

Views has been in private beta for a few weeks, during which 20+ teams have built and deployed 50+ views in production. We've had several developers new to React tell us it was simple to create Views in Airplane. We'd love for you to give it a go and send us your feedback!