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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

#151

Post by SirYandi »

ratsimihah wrote: post #94
konradb wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Perhaps not a solution to complex applications, but for trivial apps what's wrong with hiding a little complexity?

Say, by reducing the complexity of a tool that encourages a programmatic mindset you make it easier for new learners to get started who otherwise may have been scared away.

I'm not quite sure why you have a bias towards business targeted platforms... most things are these days I suppose!

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

#152

Post by pertymcpert »

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…

Seriously impressive to make something to empower people to solve their own problems.

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

#153

Post by shostack »

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 best is when you work on something, then shift to another part of the business, come back, and uncover some crazy construction that has you scratching your head and what the hell the person who made it was on at the time.

And as you wind your way through the lack of documentation or sanity in how things were done, you inevitably find some sign that the person who created it was...you.

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

#154

Post by shostack »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #75
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.

App Maker requires G Suite, which is a paid subscription service ($10/user/month for the "best deal" business tier). Probably they're hoping to grow their G Suite subscription base by offering some more value added services like App Maker. It's not a bad idea. Build your apps quickly and simply using App Maker, and you are then dependent on G Suite. However I do agree that Google has a disappointing track record when…

The lock-in is a concern. At least Google Sheets can be migrated to Excel somewhat easily.

What's the migration path look like for App Maker if you want to leave G Suite?

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

#155

Post by earenndil »

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…

Let me approach this from another angle. Excel, effectively, is 'programming for non-programmers'. And many of the accountants using it don't even realise that what they're doing is programming. So what? It works for them, helps them do their job. Maybe in the future we create neural code interfaces that let us express our code in an abstract symbolic way instead of as a sequence of characters, and we think back on textual code input in a similar way. Obviously the relationship isn't quite the same, but there's definitely a parallel. Some people can write good code and understand it, others can't, same with any platform. So what?

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

#156

Post by earenndil »

degenerate wrote: post #136
slantyyz wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

> 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.

Is this not the problem with any programming language? It's turing-complete, yet you find something you can't do (I mean, brainfuck is turing-complete, but try implementing a closure in it), you complain to the maintainers, they say it doesn't fit the design criteria. Sure, you might be more likely to fit those limits earlier in a visual code design tool, but that's not a fundamental design limitation, just an implementation one.

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

#157

Post by prepend »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #60
prepend wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s what my IT people said. SharePoint is harder to use, integrates poorly into outlook, lists are a terrible data source, SharePoint permissions are buggy, and the pricing model is all different than outlook.

It’s effectively a whole different platform than exchange and so it’s basically easier to use survey monkey or google forms.

But hopefully this gets better with office365.

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

#158

Post by prepend »

candiodari wrote: post #92
prepend wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’m a software developer. I build big things, and I wrestle through rewrites of spaghetti Code. I once had to convert a start up from a cold fusion web site the ceo and biz dev (both non developers) had written. I get it.

But I think there are lots of little scripts and one-offs I write that are suitable for me, but would make so sense as a large designed system. Every once in a while they’ll get promoted or reused.

The solution to this problem isn’t premature optimization to write all my code with max generalization using on the enterprise approved development platform. But to just accept in life there are positive inefficiencies.

There’s also a decentralization argument here somewhere.

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

#159

Post by deebeeoh »

spankalee wrote: post #145
neovive wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on starting a great project!. I've been experimenting with App Maker for an internal Edu project and it looks great. I noticed that Drive Tables are gone; did they not scale well?

Thanks! Drive Tables is a feature that came and went since I left the team, so I'm not sure.

They decided to stick with more standard sql.
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