My first IT job was building apps with Oracle Forms. To this day I miss the ease of creating a UI and some simple database tables with it. Sadly this requires a GSuite accounts, so it is hard to try out.
You’d like Salesforce
App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
81–90 of 159 posts
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#82Earlier 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 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…
You are wrong: the project I described is real but was most assuredly not for the company you worked with (for a start, it was for a big Utilities company... in Italy).
I just wanted to explain what happens to all the effort-saving nice little apps that people wrote to solve a real problem in the workplace... and I wasn't picking up on you specifically, I am sure you did your best and that using the tool at the time made perfect sense.
It's just that the real problem (IMHO) has never been "wow with Lotus Notes or whatever I am really productive even if I am not a full fledged developer" - the real problem is who takes responsability for it and how much of a struggle it will be to move the functionality back to a properly intgrated application.
(So apologies, it was just a rethorical trick on my part).
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#83In the past years Google has deprecated more than 100 services, so I will never trust them to build any software using their proprietary stack.
[citation needed]
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience speed vs. reliability soon transmogrifies in inertia vs. rational (and usually inertia wins). I'd like people that create "quick prototypes" and "just a throwaway excel with a few macros" realized that while they are valuably shortening the time to get something usable they are also shortening the time before their thing turns in a sort of albatross tied to the neck of the users.
I find this better than the people who try to build 3-tier sql dB driven apps for all those scenarios. My estimate is that for every 20 “throwaway Excel,” only one becomes used heavily and required a painful redesign. Trying to build all these correct from the start is actually inefficient because 1) you don’t know which 20 is right until quite a while in; 2) the idea that better requirements gathering and design is…
What lots of people fail to understand is this: little work-saving apps seems to work magically (for the users) because a lot of the logic, especially how to handle thorny edge cases which nobody considered before, is left in the brain of the user himself.
If I designed an app where a particular use case would be handled by "write down the caller's number on a post-it note and then ask George from accounting over a coffee cup at the cafeteria" I would face the firing squad.
But ironically enough this is how the "little spreadsheet my cousin helped me with over the weekend" handles this case, and all other unanticipated cases, and this is great because it's not a 3-tier sql dB driven app. (An app that handles everything else, though, and has to meet also regulatory requirements including SOX).
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#85I look forward to the consulting revenue I'll be making rebuilding the apps created by App Maker in about 3 years, when Google shuts it down.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll gladly take your word for this. My company was contracted to do the stuff I described, but the decision came from the customer's IT staff. Maybe it was political to milk more budget for the project. The point I wanted to raise is that excel, DBIII+/Clipper, VB, Access and other "low code" solutions are fine as long they help a single individual (or, at best, a small team like 2-3 people max) to be more efficient…
Yet Excel is probably one of the best "UIs" you could support for data entry in the workplace. Damn easy to create new forms, actually not that bad to implement import if the forms aren't brain damaged, it probably beats whatever you make in terms of UX for data entry not to mention ability to massage data locally. The problem is, IMO, the lack of middle ground. A lot of those solutions are old, and integration of mo…
Agreed on the middle ground.
Specifically, I would really be happy if people that launch themselves into this kind of little projects could (maybe with help from IT) decide "ok, we have reached a point of complexity where this stuff has really to be integrated back in the main system".
(And budget appropriately for this to happen).
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#87Earlier 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…
Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1667/
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#88After 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…
It's all relative. One can argue that "true" programmers program in Assembly and languages like Python or Javascript are just high-level abstractions over Assembly. SQL is another type of abstraction which was originally intended to be used by business users (hence the English-like syntax) yet developers are happy with it now. There is a need for wide variety of programming tools, ranging from very low-level to very…
>Picking the right tool for the right job will always be a problem to solve
My experience has been that this is a very challenging problem. Business leaders consistently apply pressure for faster results (rightly so!) which means that technology leaders will also be under pressure to deliver faster results.
Tools at the highest level of abstraction (like the various "declarative programming" app builders) trade away power and flexibility in return for simplicity. The sales teams that sell these tools then inevitably highlight the speed and gloss over the trade off that's being made. The message that buyers (business and tech execs) hear is that a tool can solve problems faster.
That is often true when the tool is being applied to a problem for which it's suited and can be disastrously incorrect when it's applied to a problem it's not suited to.
My experience is that the promise of "faster" often drowns out the voices warning that a tool is being applied to the wrong kind of problem.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#89This seems to be a big similarity to Zoho with their Zoho Creator software