What happens when you combine pre-built components, a few lines of code, and a community of creative builders? At the end of 2024, Weavy and Retool community members inspired us with their business collaboration tools merging data, AI, and human interaction seamlessly.
Weavy enables developers to add pre-built functions such as real-time chat, file sharing, and dynamic activity feeds into existing applications, quickly and easily. The platform integrates with popular technologies so you can build on your existing stack and avoid switching between multiple applications. It's a natural companion to Retool's app-building engine, and the Hackathon participants really showed what’s possible when you combine community efforts, ingenuity, and powerful dev tools.
Let’s take a closer look at the winners.
Retool Weavers stole the show with their Adaptive Planning Dashboard: a “dynamic, AI-augmented workspace designed to enhance productivity and support informed, adaptive planning.” This collaborative environment showcases Weavy’s communication features, Retool’s analytical tools, and AI. Real-time collaboration enables discussion and data-driven decisionmaking in context, while the real-time Google Sheets integration means everyone is working from the latest data. The Weavers also introduced TARS, a Google Gemini-powered AI assistant within Weavy’s Chat and Messenger components to enhance human interactions and make analysis easier.
TARS can help with updating data as well as analysis, such as identifying months with low production volume, identifying trends, and suggesting possible contributing factors.
Developer StaceyG wanted to create “a simple place to go, invite people, share files from different sources, and collaborate.” CollabSphere offers workspaces where team members can collaborate on projects, supported by uploads with Weavy’s cloud storage integrations and collaboration functionalities such as real-time chat, comments on files, and notifications—challenging even widely adopted, established tools for team collaboration like Microsoft Teams. An AI assistant (powered by OpenAI) is also there to enhance usability.
The hackathon jury liked CollabSphere’s channel-based collaboration approach, with the ability to create unlimited workspaces for specific topics or projects, so you can discuss work in context, without distraction from other workspaces. Notifications help to make sure you don’t miss something important).
While chat and file-upload functionalities can be challenging to implement with Retool alone, ZeroCodez’ Client Management app shows what’s possible when you add Weavy’s components to a Retool app. Client Management features a dashboard summarizing client status, client and project overviews, chat rooms, a task management system, file management, integrated video conferencing, and more. The jury liked ZeroCodez’ seamless flow of the data model across different sections, like the tabbed task management system which allows the user to filter tasks by status.
ZeroCodez says: “This app addresses the growing need for a centralized platform to manage clients, projects, and team collaboration. By leveraging Weavy and Retool, we’ve built a tool that fosters better workflows, teamwork, and client satisfaction.”
The winners offered us a glimpse of the future of real-time collaboration software—bringing together data, AI, and human collaboration. The winning projects showed a few key efficiency and productivity boosters in action:
Both the Adaptive Planning Dashboard and CollabSphere integrated AI to enhance human interactions and speed up analysis or generate ideas quickly. These developments are exciting because they show momentum towards some of the desired use cases we heard about in our State of AI survey: people want AI to help with project management and data analysis (among other things).
You don’t have to become an AI expert to start implementing it in your apps—the Retool AI resource enables you to write queries that instruct AI models to perform different actions (like generating or analyzing text, generating chat responses or images, or extracting text from documents. Those efficiency gains might be more attainable than you think.
Collaboration is only productive if everyone’s working from the same page. Our winning submissions made effective use of real-time data integrations like Google Sheets, together with Weavy Chat and Messenger to enable quick communication in context within their apps. Charts (like those seen in the Adaptive Planning Dashboard and in the Client Management app) help to visualize that data for easier analysis.
The winning apps made it easy for users not to break their flow, with the ability to import media and files from a host of sources without leaving the apps. Using a combo of Weavy’s File Sharing Integrations and Retool’s file inputs, the winners created platforms where users could discuss work on just about anything—in real time or asynchronously.
You can take any of these individual ideas and apply them to your existing systems. Weavy and Retool make it easy: Weavy allows developers to quickly integrate advanced pre-built features, such as real-time chat, file sharing, and activity feeds, into existing applications without having to build from scratch. With Retool, you can integrate all of these features with new and existing apps for smooth and effective teamwork.
By using Weavy together with Retool, you have a toolkit of pre-built integrations and components that save you starting from scratch—freeing you up to focus on writing the important, organization-specific code that only you can write.
Learn more about Retool AI, real-time data, and components, or dive right in and build something for free today (no, really—StaceyG built CollabSphere in about four hours!).
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