If you are a developer building business apps, the odds are that you and/or your colleagues spend too much time building and maintaining basic CRUD APIs and maintenance screens for all the data your app needs. The worst part is that a significant percentage of it is not even processed to add value, merely stored and displayed (think of all the description fields, notes, instructions, comments, etc). Your time is usually the most expensive resource for software companies. That time should be spent writing software that adds significant value to your company and/or your company's customers.
We at De Re CRUD think that the mechanical operation of providing CRUD APIs and screens with proper validation, error handling, security, and lots more can be written once and simply applied to your data. As a side benefit, you will get tools to help you define, document, and publish the schema for your model. And for just three additional payments, no wait, I've seen too many infomercials, this is open source, you don't have to pay to use this. Seriously though, you can use the APIs internally and get the same features in the parts you build.
All this is not to say that you should not have a model layer in your application. We think that you should, we just think that the model should not be cluttered with simple repetitive validation, security, auditing, etc. logic. We envision a future where you can define the data with all its formatting, validation, and relationships together with the prompts, hints, and help text so that it can all be used effectively. SQL databases have long provided a portion of this, but they lack several critical pieces, for example user text like prompts and useful error messaging. Plus, lots of systems are moving away from SQL databases. Using a schemaless database does not mean you don't have a schema, rather it just means the database is not enforcing the schema.
Getting started only takes five fairly simple steps. You don't even have to do all of any one step, start small and grow incrementally.
Enabling the power of De Re CRUD starts by defining the schema for your model. We include much more information in the schema than most systems you have likely used, but it is not more information than you have, you just did not put it all in one place. In addition to allowing us to generate APIs, screens, documentation, and more, putting all this information together is just a good idea. Your schema will benefit from SPoT/SSOT, DRY, and DiE principles. Aside from the obvious benefits of consistent behaviours and appearance (e.g. changing every occurrence of a field's prompt by changing it in exactly one place), there are less obvious examples like improving your teams understanding of the model by seeing more of it at once.
We will be providing a user friendly tool to define and maintain your schema. In a classic example of Eating Your Own Dogfood, this tool will be written by defining the schema of a schema and using the maintenance UIs in the tool with a local storage engine.
In most cases, your schema will be a logical view of the information, but the real world requirements of storing that data will impose restrictions on your layout. De Re CRUD will provide a simple mapping between your logical schema and your physical storage.
We will be providing a server (likely Node.js based) that will serve the APIs and UIs. We plan on a modular approach, so alternate server implementations are possible. Don't see a server implementation for your preferred environment, we will provide lots of documentation to help you write one in your preferred language.
The server will require access to your data storage, so you will need to configure the storage access via pluggable storage engines. We will be providing some standard storage engines, and the interface will be well documented allowing additional engines to be written.
The pluggable nature of De Re CRUD will allow you to choose which services you would like to use. Each major feature will be a separate module, so if you don't want APIs, simply disable that module. Want to provide a feature of your own design, then just add your module to the list.
All that is left is to run the server and enjoy never writing a CRUD API or maintenance screen again!