SnailyCAD

Introduction

SnailyCAD is an open-source Computer Aided Dispatch, which is used by police and dispatch roleplaying communities for FiveM. It has reached a lot of interest and positive feedback from many communities and individuals. SnailyCAD is being updated almost every day with bug fixes and new features.

The Beginning

SnailyCAD was originally created as a private Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) for a community I was a member of. They were looking for a free and self-hostable CAD however, couldn't find any good fits. Therefore, I decided to start developing my own CAD for the community.

After many weeks of work, the first version was released stable. The community members started testing and using daily, ... it crashed. SnailyCAD was written quite poorly because I didn't have the expertise in coding back then. I decided to start from scratch and release a v2 with a lot of new features and a better codebase. SnailyCADv2 wasn't connected to 1 community anymore. It was open-source and free for everyone to use.

The Growth

SnailyCADv2 started picking up a bunch of growth, but I soon realized that it also didn't have the best codebase and quite hard to maintain, since I wasn't using any frameworks.

SnailyCADv3 was born written all in Next.js, it didn't survive long. Next.js is awesome for writing frontend code, but the API routes were a pain to maintain and were quite slow (cold boot).

Now

SnailyCADv4 is written in the latest and greatest tech. Using TsED.io for managing the API. It's a framework that can be used on top of Express.js. It includes tons of useful plugins, for example: for generating docs, authentication, middleware. Prisma is used for the database, it's a really nice ORM that can be used with PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and more. It's really easy to use and has a lot of features. The frontend is still written in Next.js using SSR. It's a lot faster than SnailyCADv3 and a lot easier to maintain.

Over time, I was able to move very quick, implement tons of new features thanks to all these tech stacks. I'm extremely happy with the current state of SnailyCAD, and I'm looking forward to the future. Many people have been using SnailyCAD, and I'm really happy to see that it's being used by many communities.

Full tech stack

• TsED.io
• Express.js
• Prisma
• Next.js/React.js
• PostgreSQL
• Docker
• TypeScript
• TailwindCSS