App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta

During my first job after university, I spent a bunch of time developing apps using Lotus Notes. Because all of the company's 2000+ employees already used Lotus Notes for email and calendering, deploying these apps was easy.

And in many cases I was able to develop the basic functionality of a workflow app whilst I was talking with the main user to gather requirements. And, although the platform supported a proper programming language (LotusScript, with almost the same syntax as VB), I was often able to build what I needed with just the GUI tools and a few formulae (roughly equivalent to formulae in Excel).

There are a lot of Lotus Notes haters. I think the majority were put off by the email experience, which is very different from other systems.

But the ease of developing, deploying, updating and using internal-only workflow applications was truly awesome.

I hope App Maker is as easy to set up, for simple use cases at least.

great

Says it supports CloudSQL? Does it support Cloud Datastore / Firestore or are they on the road map does anyone know?

I wonder if Google will deliberately feed the App Maker backlog with features that enable building functionalities from apps that are hosted on Google Cloud? That could undercut some of their customers to the benefit of other customers.

Its actually what Visix Vibe used to be.

In computing we are constantly re-inventing things we threw away..