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

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

#131

Post by zenovision » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

bitmapbrother wrote: post #113

zenovision wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 deprecated services in 2018 alone (in just 6 months...)

I'm not seeing 24 products in 2018, but just 1 - Encrypted Search. I just realized you're counting the Others section and incorrectly lumping them into 2018. It would seem you also neglected to read Wikipedia's banner above the Other section that stated: This section is missing information about the discontinuation date of each product in this section. Please expand the section to include this information. Further de…

but still more than 100 discontinued services...

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

#132

Post by drawkbox » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

projectramo wrote: post #59

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 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…

The easiest scapegoat in software history: the previous developer(s).

The same dev(s) that allowed the place to run with all the long hours and the most check-ins, are the cause of all the woes when the next dev(s) take over (usually to justify a version 2).

The second easiest scapegoat: third parties, component builders and providers.

All of these can be attributed to Not invented here (NIH) syndrome. [1]

Devs always know more about a system they themselves worked on, and noone wants to be liable for a system that they didn't build that can have hidden gotchas simply because it was NIH.

At every iteration in every single system, even outside of software (you can see this in generations and politics), each iteration teaches lessons and uncovers unknown problems or creates them. Many times this is no fault of the creators but the simple iteration attempt progressed knowledge enough to be able to learn about a new problem that could not be found without said iteration/advancement. In this sense iterations and different teams aren't bad, but they will always blame the former because it uncovered new problems, which is ultimately a gift to solutions and progression.

New problems create new solutions which are what we call progression and innovation, and the next in line should be happy those problems were found that they can solve, for they themselves will eventually be providing this service to those after them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

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

#133

Post by kristaps » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

prepend wrote: post #45

Pamar wrote: post #41

Earlier 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…

Agree, understanding this point is a significant milestone on the way to becoming a good engineer.

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

#134

Post by intrasight » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 5:49 PM UTC

occams_chainsaw wrote: post #62

projectramo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are also the people before and after you

I needed that laugh

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

#135

Post by michaelper22 » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 5:55 PM UTC

neurobashing wrote: post #104

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…

I had a lot of the same opinions, and then I actually got a job at a low-code platform vendor. The biggest thing I learned, the secret truth, is that "low-code" is intended to be a force multiplier for "real programmers". Low-code dev shops look exactly like every "real" shop I've seen: source control, sprints, Jira, "omg feature creep" meetings, insane stakeholders, the works. "low-code" developers are "real" softwa…

I did QA for a Pega BPM project at a regulated company, working with an off-site (though on-shore) Pega consulting firm. Aside from the usual big-co version of "agile", and that this was a legacy rewrite, the process was more or less the same as regular C#/Java development.

Funny thing with Pega is once you break out of the normal BPM-style flow, you'll write almost as much code as an all-code platform, just cookie-cuttered into form fields.

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

#136

Post by degenerate » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #111

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…

>> All of them are trying to abstract away the complex parts of the programming problem. You're right, but you're also looking at it from the lens of a programmer. From a user's perspective, they have a problem to solve, and they just want a tool that will help them. From their perspective, they are not thinking about it like a programming problem. Even if they have to write a little bit of script/code, they don't ne…

But here's the problem: at some point, the user wants the tool to do something beyond what the tool can do.

And at that point, the user is stuck. Customer service recommends posting a feature request in the product forums and all the user can do is wait... and hope something gets implemented that solves their problem, or find a new tool.

But with programming, it's possible to execute scripts, make system calls, write to files, and initiate network connections to talk to APIs and invoke other 'tools' to continue the task at hand. The tool is now a shape-shifting collection of code that can take on many challenges, limited only by the creativity of the developer. You can't do that with a WYSIWYG, it would be too complex to allow all these functions, so the next best thing is allowing plugins, at which point the tool now requires programming knowledge anyway.

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

#137

Post by j45 » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

spankalee wrote: post #128

I started this as my 20% project many, many years ago. I since moved on to the Dart and now Polymer teams, but I'm very, very happy to see the project launch. App Maker has been a huge force multiplier internally at Google. Hundreds of smaller internal apps, many catering to very specific business and HR tasks were created by non-engineers, often times by the owners of the process themselves. This self-determinism in…

Congrats, my hope is something like this can become a more usable MS Access replacement.

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

#138

Post by j45 » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

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.

It seems a little presumptuous to assume every app in any language is not built well.

A mess can be made in any language, by every developer, if we're improving every day, looking back, our work looking back 5 years will always look and often feel like garbage.

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

#139

Post by enraged_camel » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #54

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 embr…

>>If it makes money, they will keep it.

In large organizations, things are never that simple. There are about a hundred other factors that go into deciding whether a project or initiative is maintained or abandoned. Lawsuits, corporate politics, changing company direction, acquisitions and sell-offs... things rarely come down to "we're making a profit on this so let's keep it alive."

Then there's also opportunity cost. Let's say the project has a 200% profit margin: total revenue is two times total cost. That still doesn't mean it won't be abandoned, because someone might decide that those resources can be better spent on another project that has a 300% profit margin.

Basically what I'm saying is, don't count on App Maker to be a long-term project. There is literally no way to know, but lots of reasons to suspect it will be abandoned (based on Google's track record alone).

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

#140

Post by bitmapbrother » Fri, Jun 15, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

zenovision wrote: post #131

bitmapbrother wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing 24 products in 2018, but just 1 - Encrypted Search. I just realized you're counting the Others section and incorrectly lumping them into 2018. It would seem you also neglected to read Wikipedia's banner above the Other section that stated: This section is missing information about the discontinuation date of each product in this section. Please expand the section to include this information. Further de…

but still more than 100 discontinued services...

What does that have anything to do with your original comment? You incorrectly stated there were 24 in 2018 when in actuality there was only 1.