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Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

aws.amazon.com

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Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#91

Post by txcwpalpha »

avolcano wrote: post #3

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the spa…

>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 want to use.

But actually, I'm messing around with Honeycode right now and although I haven't gotten a chance to really dig deep and test the long-term usability of it, I have to say that so far it is gorgeous and intuitive. If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#92

Post by cosmodisk »

kmnc wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very large target audience which is technical enough to write Excel formulas but not enough to build an app. Your mother or father will never need to use this tool as it is, but those people will.

Wait, who are these people? WYSIWYG App builders have existed for decades and Excel still dominates. Maybe you don't agree, but the main reason for this in my opinion is because these app builders are way too complicated and learning them is largely pointless since their use cases are generally super trivial. Why build an app if Excel+Email works? Further, if these things do start taking off I don't think the people…

It's not that they are difficult or something but usually the decision makers,who could make Excel,as a local database,backup system and CRM platform on Annie's PC go,have no concept of what's better or worse or that sending hundreds of Excel files back and forth is not a great idea. There are people out there running thousands people divisions and having no clue that they could probably get rid of 20% of them just if they would have some centralised system.

Why build an app if Excel+Email works?

Of course it does.There are people on YouTube making houses with swimming pools by carving soil with some primitive tools but does that mean it's the best way to go?

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#93

Post by outworlder »

cosmotic wrote: post #56

Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?

> Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone?

Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is.

Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#94

Post by trixie_ »

jnwatson wrote: post #50
mg794613 wrote: post #7

Ok honestly, my first thought was "here we go again", BUT when you look at the @jeffbar provided, you can see, that yes, it is "visual" programming. It does however require a certain logical fluency. So I was wrong: It is _not_ the sales/ceo dream of no longer having pesky engineers. It's a proper gateway drug into programming.

The most common fallacy across almost 40 years of visual programming attempts is that one can somehow escape the essential complexity of a problem domain. One must have "a certain logical fluency" to design essentially any process, regardless of the technology used.

I'm pretty sure the zillions of Excel users proves it's not logic that's the problem It's all the scaffolding around it that is the real barrier of entry to most development systems.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#95

Post by darepublic »

What we need in this space is basically a UI where you build out what the presentation of the data looks like, what the permissions will be, and then an app gets generated for you automatically. You see the generated product and can then iterate but instead of with devs with tireless coding automatons

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#96

Post by mehrdadn »

lubujackson wrote: post #90
cbdumas wrote: post #73

I 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's the theory, but don't forget the time you spend upgrading Python because some dependency needs it, but some other part isn't compatible with the new version so you spend an hour on Google trying to sort that out. Or the time you spend trying to debug some basic functionality you've written 20 times before because it isn't quite working with everything else for some reason...

Is there even a way to update Python on Windows? I haven't figured out any way other than duplicate installs, a bunch of manual copy/paste/extract of older packages, and hoping for the best.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#97

Post by majormajor »

grumple wrote: post #89
nickff wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

> you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

If doing the first versions in this thing meant you got to that position 6 months earlier than you would've otherwise, you shouldn't wish you'd just done it in Python from the start - your business would be missing even the functionality it has now for another six months.

You will, though, need to get creative and figure out the fastest way to get something close enough to X to make them happy in the tool, or with a hybrid tool+adhoc script approach, etc, though.

So there's still a lot of benefits there to knowing the fundamentals.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#100

Post by sipos »

lubujackson wrote: post #90
cbdumas wrote: post #73

I 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's the theory, but don't forget the time you spend upgrading Python because some dependency needs it, but some other part isn't compatible with the new version so you spend an hour on Google trying to sort that out. Or the time you spend trying to debug some basic functionality you've written 20 times before because it isn't quite working with everything else for some reason...

That is true, but, equally, you are underestimating the time you spend trying toi do something that your no-code framework can't do, and the extra cost of working with it.
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