I for one am quite excited about app maker. Finally a CRUD tool that links to just about any data source (including spreadsheets), does not require desktop software, generates properly responsive applications, needs no maintenance or upgrades to be secure and will presumably be compatible with Google forms.
App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
11–20 of 159 posts
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#12During 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 pro…
Tools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize.
But just like excel, it's a double edged sword, as people "specialize" in it and create monstrous abomination applications way larger than the tool is fit to sustain. It becomes a rat maze of gotchas and obscure tricks, and nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#13During 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 pro…
Tools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize. But just like excel, it's a double edged sword, as people "specialize" in it and create monstrous abomination applications way larger than the tool is fit to sustain. It becomes a rat maze of gotchas and obscure tricks, and nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
> nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
perl devs used to refer to this as job security :)
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#14How will this not become hell on earth for software developers, al-la Microsoft Access, Oracle APEX, etc.. ??
Just say no. Developers should recognize when a tool no longer fits the problem space and move on. That does not invalidate the other usecases in any way. Not everyone is a developer, not every problem needs to scale.
Unfortunately, yes, this will become hell for some. Job security for others and ..
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#15Don't want to sound overly negative but for some reason this makes me think of SharePoint. I'm sure it's nothing like it though :)
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#16In many ways I think this is what Microsoft Access should've been.
Well, its more like what Sharepoint tries to be.
It's what SharePoint is. Except that by the time you've fought through the awful tooling, horrible performance and useless documentation just to do simple things you've forgotten (or no longer care) about what the original problem you were trying to solve was.
This looks much better. Hopefully it's not a Wave-esque Google hobby.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#17After more than two decades in the industry, you start getting cynical towards these kind of "programming for non-programmers" tools. All of them are trying to abstract away the complex parts of the programming problem. Guess what, it doesn't matter how many layers of abstraction you pile up, you never abstract away the need for consistent logic. You end up requiring the same kind of people that have the brain skills to actually program.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#18During 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 pro…
Tools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize. But just like excel, it's a double edged sword, as people "specialize" in it and create monstrous abomination applications way larger than the tool is fit to sustain. It becomes a rat maze of gotchas and obscure tricks, and nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
> nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on
That’s true of most “serious” codebases too! Writing code that others can understand takes time and expertise (both expensive), and it’s often not worth it for one-off tools.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#19After more than two decades in the industry, you start getting cynical towards these kind of "programming for non-programmers" tools. All of them are trying to abstract away the complex parts of the programming problem. Guess what, it doesn't matter how many layers of abstraction you pile up, you never abstract away the need for consistent logic. You end up requiring the same kind of people that have the brain skills…
True, but there are many people who can handle consistent logic but are not familiar with all the technical detail required for general purpose software development.
There is a lot of complexity that is completely unrelated to the core logic of a solution to a particular problem.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#20During 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 pro…
Tools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize. But just like excel, it's a double edged sword, as people "specialize" in it and create monstrous abomination applications way larger than the tool is fit to sustain. It becomes a rat maze of gotchas and obscure tricks, and nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
A friend of mine spent a very lucrative few years in the late 90s, early 00s doing Excel contracting. Usually for banks who seemed to have quite a lot of these monstrous abominations and a wish to make them far more monstrous going by conversations back then.
Paid for their Porsche 911 until the .com bust broke contracting generally.