And if if ever gets discontinued you lose everything you might have ever built forever.
Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
221–230 of 331 posts
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#222Seems like an AirTable/PowerApps competitor, but an early version which means the polish isn't there. Personally I prefer Coda.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#223When looking at the website, I do think this could be a very decent product that could fulfil a business need.
From what I've seen many businesses use Excel sheets as a sort of apps. And this seems to be a mobile-compatible version of that idea. Of course it'll be very limited, but for a certain niche of business apps it could be very useful as a replacement for Excel.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I see this line of thought floated a lot. Go build a fully dynamic app used by internal teams with just those three tools and tell me how it goes after you've been maintaining and building on it for a while. Those are good building blocks but they're simply not sufficient if you are building a 'Web App' and not a 'Website'. Also I'll cut off the inevitable, "The web was not built for this and it shouldn't become a pl…
> Go build a fully dynamic app We're talking about internal tooling for businesses here, this isn't necessary at all. I disagree with the person you're responding to, PHP and HTML should be more than enough for such things.
> We're talking about internal tooling for businesses here, this isn't necessary at all.
Why treat internal 'customers' any differently than forward facing ones? Building great internal tools can dramatically improve your teams' workflows and solve meaningful business problems.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Go build a fully dynamic app We're talking about internal tooling for businesses here, this isn't necessary at all. I disagree with the person you're responding to, PHP and HTML should be more than enough for such things.
> We're talking about internal tooling for businesses here, this isn't necessary at all. Why treat internal 'customers' any differently than forward facing ones? Building great internal tools can dramatically improve your teams' workflows and solve meaningful business problems.
Right on! This is exactly correct, you remove so much friction for internal teams by building high quality apps.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#226So this is Microsoft Access as a service?
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#227I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…
That is exactly what some of the low-code tools aim to address: by having a visual, highly productive tool, you enable better collaboration with business stakeholders.
Requirements gathering becomes an interactive process where you sit together with a business stakeholder to model your application together: by doing it in a visual manner, the stakeholder can understand what you are doing, and you can process suggestions and feedback in seconds, so that the stakeholder can immediately validate the results of a change.
Doesn't work for all requirements, but in many cases you get better software because you understand the requirements better.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#228Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they wan…
Can someone smarter than me explain why the AWS UI is so off-putting? I also find myself just put off by AWS UIs. I can't even figure out why I hate it so much. Looking at the screenshots though immediately filled me with the sense that this thing would just be awful to use. When I go back to the screenshots to try to find objective things I dislike about the UI, I can't really find anything. It seems to do the stuff…
A bit of backround: a service typically builds their API first, and then builds the console as a front-end to that API. For most services, everything you can do in the console, you can do via an API call. (I assume Honeycomb is an exception to this.)
That API-first doctrine is at the heart of the underlying problems, which are:
1. Machine-friendly data models.
2. Distributed-friendly data models.
3. Deliberately independent and orthogonal services.
4. A vast range of customer needs over a console that doesn't itself make money.
AWS really does put effort into making their console useful for getting work done. You'll find some workflows that are pretty usable.
But when you get outside a handful of extremely common workflows that were technically convenient for a specific team to implement, those problems become dominant and the console becomes painful if not f*ing useless.
That's why (I suspect) you hate it.
> ... and staring at a spinner spin for far too long.
Oh yeah, fundamental cloud problem #5: "A few minutes" is absolutely forever when you're troubleshooting.
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right about perceived barriers to entry, and I certainly didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that anyone should "just" learn to code. But I think the promise of "apps without code" is a siren song, always ending in frustration. I'd never tell anyone that learning to code is easy (only that most people can do it with some hard work), but I would also never tell anyone that tools like this will make it…
Two things to add: 1) Agreed. Writing the code is the easy part. Determining and defining what to build? That's the magic. 2) In the wrong hands, making things too easy can be detrimental. First, there's add too much, simply because you can. For instance, WordPress n00bs are notorious for adding too many plugins. Why? Because they can. The second reason is, changing too soon without enough data, without enough user i…
Agreed on 2), software development has become too easy, look at all the rubish people are putting online and in the appstores.
Javascript, java and python have made it too easy to write software. Would be better to return back to the days when everything was written in C and Assembly.
/s
Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code
#230Delphi was my first experience on apps without much coding, it helped me understand event driven programming.