In 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]
App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
91–100 of 159 posts
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#92Earlier 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…
This is a board with 90% or so software developers. Your point, of course, is accurate. It's going to get torn down anyway.
It's like convincing lawyers that they're not needed in situation X. Doesn't work.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#93Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
To add some subjective constructive feedback, I think the idea behind App maker is crap.
I'm also interested in why you think it is a crap idea as opposed to complaints about the implementation or UI.
I don't think a layer of abstraction that hides away the complexities of building apps is a solution to a problem to begin with.
I'm probably wrong and biased by the fact that not only does it take away the fun in engineering products, but also that the target demography is "business."
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#95Earlier 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…
This is a real misconception a lot of programmers have about Lotus Notes shops.
I also worked in a Lotus Notes shop for several years. We built apps on Notes/Domino and did some pretty cool stuff pre-dot-com, including a Project Management system like Basecamp[1] that was a hosted SAAS (using Domino's web server) in 1998 (crazy to think that was 20 years ago), when SAAS was just a buzzword.
IIRC, more than half of our company's Notes development staff were comp sci grads. It wasn't just a bunch of random dudes throwing a bunch of forms together using the built-in formula language.
[1] https://books.google.ca/books?id=jlIEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA52&lpg=PA...
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
A problem is that before you have a webapp at the level of Excel without any customization, we're talking developer years of effort. Webapp frameworks are for trivial frontends, they make the equivalent of slide handouts.
(so "budget appropriately" means developer years for simple apps with equivalent functionality to basic excel sheets. It is not reasonable to expect this to happen)
In 2009 or so everybody decided that webapps don't even need a data table component at all, and I have yet to find such a component that has the features of Delphi 1.0's datagrid (sorting by row, dynamic rows, built in search, accessible, ...)
GWT is the only thing that even came close, even made an attempt (and tolerable means, the third iteration - cell tables). It's the only thing that I ever found tolerable for developing business web apps.
This means that anything built after that point that has a web UI has subpar data presentation to a windows 3.1 app. And it shows. Handling nontrivial amounts of data in a webapp ... well compare Google Sheets with Excel, and it's obvious even there. Sadly Google Sheets probably has hundreds of developer-years in it at least, maybe thousands, and that's what it requires to get a webapp to that point.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#97Earlier 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.
Hmm all of the features you describe can be done with Notes/Domino. Granted, it's not pretty, but it's there.
Yeah, Notes/Domino got a bad rap for a lot of stuff, like the cruddy 90s UI that never got updated, but it was quite powerful for what it was.
A couple of things in particular were really good - reliable replication (which meant your workers could work offline and sync back later) and the document based store.
Fast forward 20 years from Domino 3, and you'll notice that the document based store model is still around in the form of CouchDB (spiritual successor to Domino?) and other products like MongoDB.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#98Quick Base has been running its no code platform for almost 2 decades and does not tie you to an information or vendor silo - happy to integrate with many cloud and data integrations.
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#99Tired of having the services and products you like deprecated and abandoned? Now you can build your own services on a platform that will end up deprecated and abandoned!
Re: App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm all of the features you describe can be done with Notes/Domino. Granted, it's not pretty, but it's there.
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…
>> The moment that they need to scale, they become a liability, like...
Yeah, but this is true of just about any home-grown solution, whether they are "low code" or not. There are surely a lot of VB and PHP ("high code"?) applications that were quickly thrown together to solve what was at the beginning a small problem.
The reason they're not best practices is usually because there's no IT support or money to build it, so someone (often self-learned) finds a way to build it themselves. You can complain about having to rewrite it once it became a mission-critical app, but more often than not, that app would have never been written by a seasoned developer because the original user(s) of the tool couldn't justify the resources to build it at the time.