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

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

#51

Post by prepend »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #19
bigato wrote: post #17

After 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.

I have not experienced this. Every 4GL/5GL/wysiwyg in my decades ended up with some specialized user type learning the syntax of dragging blocks or whatnot.

I’ve seen lots of demos (and bought lots) of reporting or automation tools intended for the “CEO” to make their own ad how reports only to have that mean that consultants are hired or someone else do it.

At the end of the day, the hard part for many people is the idea of variables and abstraction and interfaces and looping and operators. Making a button vs a keyword to do this is maybe easier, but it doesn’t really Bridge very well to non-programmers.

The closest I’ve seen is Excel with people who will not try R or Python but can write lots of stuff in Excel functions and pivots and maybe macros.

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

#53

Post by pjmlp »

zeisss wrote: post #48
pjmlp wrote: post #27

> any other database that supports JDBC Did they implement the JDBC p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ API in JavaScript?! EDIT: Apparently they did exactly that, https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/jdbc/

JDBC is not a protocol, so they probably just created a binding between Java/JDBC and whatever AppMaker uses

Yeah, I express myself badly, still they fully replicated the API in JavaScript.

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

#54

Post by segmondy »

pavlov wrote: post #33

I suspect Google App Maker will end up effectively abandoned like Google Web Designer: https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ Google dabbles in these tools, but the business case isn't really there. If anything Web Designer should have been more likely to succeed because it had a direct application — designing rich ads — that would benefit Google's primary moneymaker.

It's a tool for businesses to get a web site presence so they can pay Google money to promote their sites.

If it makes money, they will keep it. Think about it, Google is paying $300-$400k per engineer, if they have 10 people working on this that's $3-$4 mil per year plus the cost of infrastructure. If the experiment doesn't pan out after a few years, they will kill it.

It's strange to me that HN is a crowd that embraces the idea of "experiment often and toss it if it doesn't work" but then is shocked when Google does the same.

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

#55

Post by petra »

pavlov wrote: post #33

I suspect Google App Maker will end up effectively abandoned like Google Web Designer: https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ Google dabbles in these tools, but the business case isn't really there. If anything Web Designer should have been more likely to succeed because it had a direct application — designing rich ads — that would benefit Google's primary moneymaker.

The business is simple: helping companies get stuck on Google's cloud, Same as microsoft sharepoint/power-apps(?) and Amazon is also working on such tool.

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

#57

Post by rahimnathwani »

Pamar wrote: post #26
rahimnathwani wrote: post #2

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 pro…

Hi, I am the guy that came in a few years later and had to reimplement a bunch of custom (undocumented) Lotus Notes applications in order to move actual documents to a proper document management system (with access profiles and searchability) integrating the apps in an intranet portal, allow them to talk with other applications and finally put everything under SSO. Thank you for the experience.

I understand the sentiment, but you are assuming:

1. The applications I created were undocumented. They weren't.

2. The applications I wrote were used for managing documents. They weren't (with one exception, which was for publishing process manuals on the intranet, to save trees and improved searchability. That app had no functionality except for the Lotus Notes built-in storage/retrieval/search, and each record had 3 fields: title, reference, content).

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

#58

Post by rahimnathwani »

lostcolony wrote: post #35
Pamar wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I am the guy that came in a few years later and had to reimplement a bunch of custom (undocumented) Lotus Notes applications in order to move actual documents to a proper document management system (with access profiles and searchability) integrating the apps in an intranet portal, allow them to talk with other applications and finally put everything under SSO. Thank you for the experience.

I'm one of the team that was hired to take the Excel app that one overdue-to-retire person had spent 20+ years developing (without documentation, and inserting every miscellaneous feature he felt was desirable, regardless of actual need, and which, of course, he wanted all of to be kept) for the entire company's metrics and reporting, and turn it into something that could actually be understood by anyone else, with p…

Yes, we stand on the shoulders of giants :)

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

#59

Post by projectramo »

Pamar wrote: post #26
rahimnathwani wrote: post #2

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 pro…

Hi, I am the guy that came in a few years later and had to reimplement a bunch of custom (undocumented) Lotus Notes applications in order to move actual documents to a proper document management system (with access profiles and searchability) integrating the apps in an intranet portal, allow them to talk with other applications and finally put everything under SSO. Thank you for the experience.

I have also found that when I enter a new workplace, everything done before me was a mess of unwieldy, poorly documented and unstructured code. Worse it uses an old, archaic platform that is long overdue for a complete overhaul.

Then when I arrive, I make everything logical, nice, structured and proper.

After I leave, once again the place falls prey to disorganized minds who take my work and mess it up for flashy new technologies that are not as reliable as what I had done.

For some reason, this keeps happening.

edit: corrected word thanks to @brlewis

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

#60

Post by rahimnathwani »

prepend wrote: post #46
rahimnathwani wrote: post #2

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 pro…

I worked for a huge consulting firm that had built a lot of workflows around Lotus. I hated it at the time, but then I moved to an org using Exchange. I asked how to do something simple like send a five question survey by email, allowing editing, and combining results into a dB and was surprised Exchange didn’t have an equivalent. The Exchange people pointed me to the SharePoint people who explained this is an entire…

If you don't care about confidentiality, then you can do a simple survey using a SharePoint 'List'. It's as easy to set up as a Notes database. But less flexible.
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