Topsail JSON Schema Engine

Generate complex business applications with JSON Schemas

History

Topsail started off as a simple single-html-file application that provided a thin wrapper over angular schema-form and math.js. I made it over a weekend to help a good friend blow people's minds in his new-grad corporate finance job by letting him turn his excel sheets into json-defined "mini web applications" without actually knowing how to code. This small weekend project eventually kickstarted my consulting career when a 7-digit in-house application inspired by one of these "mini web applications" blew past its budget one too many times and higher-ups looked to track down the original creator of these configurable mini web apps.

Over the years Topsail was improved as an in-house product of my consultancy. By its last version around 2018, it was a fully-featured admin application that supported excel formulas through Formula.js, had a custom schema editor environment, supported some ridiculously complex logic, was entirely configurable from a sharepoint database (with Boolean matrix representation of rollup sums), provided visualizations via vega.js, and could even fill in documents with a fork of pdf.js.