Airplane is the developer platform for quickly building powerful internal tools. With Airplane, you can deploy applications from scripts, queries, and APIs and build custom UIs and workflows to fit the unique needs of your business.
Airplane today: code to apps, in minutes
When thinking about how to build internal apps, we started with a simple but powerful abstraction: Airplane Tasks. Tasks are the core building blocks of Airplane. They help transform duct-taped scripts and cron jobs into safe, reusable tools. An engineer can deploy a script to Airplane that represents a business operation that needs to be made accessible to others. For example, you can use Airplane to kick off a GDPR deletion request, start/stop a microservice, or cancel a pending money transfer.
Airplane layers on a web UI, notifications, input validation, role-based access controls, approval flows, audit logs, schedules, and more to turn these scripts into enterprise-grade applications that can be shared safely.
Today, we're introducing a feature that will massively increase the scope of what Airplane is capable of.
Introducing Airplane Views: rapidly build full-featured UIs using React
We're excited to introduce Airplane Views – a React-based platform for rapidly building full-featured UIs ("Views"). Views are built in React and TypeScript/JavaScript and can be used to build things like admin panels or customer onboarding and metrics dashboards. We now offer a fast-growing library of built-in components and a deep integration with Airplane Tasks to create powerful interfaces and workflows. Combined with what Airplane can already do, this new feature will let Airplane serve as a complete, developer-focused platform for building sophisticated internal tools. Here's why we're excited about Views:
Powerful custom UIs built using React
With Views, users can build internal tools with custom UIs to match their exact needs. Airplane Views are built using out-of-the-box React components, tailored specifically for internal use cases. We support optimal UX practices and provide excellent design from the start, so you don't have to spend time designing internal dashboards and managing state. Additionally, simple Views require minimal code because Airplane components and our state management system do most of the heavy lifting for you 💪. Developing, deploying, and maintaining a View is much easier than setting up your own React app from scratch.
Tightly integrated with the Airplane ecosystem
Easily execute Tasks from Views and build enterprise-grade workflows into your existing Airplane apps. Together, Tasks and Views give you access to a powerful orchestration engine that can orchestrate across (1) external resources (e.g. databases, SaaS APIs, internal APIs), (2) operations involving users and groups (e.g. prompts, approvals, authentication), and (3) operations expressed as custom code (Airplane Tasks).
Fully extensible as code
Our code-based approach gives you infinite flexibility to tailor views as you need. You can use your own components, talk to remote APIs, and import existing code libraries. You can also store Airplane Views code in your own codebase, so you get the full benefits of version control, code review, CI/CD, and integration tests.
Here's how our customers are using Views
User management
Many companies use Airplane to build full-featured admin panels that their support and customer success teams can use for user management workflows. These include things like looking up customer data, updating billing details, extending free product trials, executing GDPR deletions, and more.
PHI and data protection
Healthtech companies use Airplane to provide access to critical operations while still protecting sensitive customer data. For example, customer success and support teams can use Views and Tasks to display and pull specific customer requests from a patient portal without having access to all the sensitive information in the underlying dataset, such as medical records, billing information, and visit history.
Fraud detection
Fintech companies often have to monitor thousands of transactions daily, so workflows that enable them to detect fraud, flag users, and clear false alarms are critical. These companies use Airplane to build fraud monitoring UIs with event triggers to detect patterns of malicious behavior, identify risky transactions, and then flag or ban suspicious users.
What's next
We have a ton of exciting stuff coming in the next few months. We're working on supporting more complex multi-step workflows, adding more integrations, expanding our Views component library, and continuing to make our developer experience even better. If anything in this post piqued your interest, please say hi at [email protected].
