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Vaguely related: curious what people here think of OutSystems as a developer platform. More generally, what do people think of ever using a system like this - I

Vaguely related: curious what people here think of OutSystems as a developer platform. More generally, what do people think of ever using a system like this - I would be petrified of the company going out of business and being trapped. OutSystems looks very cool.

zmoreira 10y ago
I have been a Outsystems developer for the last 10 years. I feel quite comfortable about my future prospects, but I live in Portugal where Outsystems has 100% penetration in large companies. I think there is no chance of the company going out of business since so many big customers depend on it. The platform is expanding fast and lately it's getting harder to find developers for my teams. Many of the most experienced developers are working on project abroad where rates are much higher (Benelux, the Gulf, United States). As a developer platform it really makes you more productive. I was working with .NET before and I think I became 10 times more productive (of course this could mean that I sucked as a .NET developer). However licensing is expensive, so it's not for every customer and also not for every project. For enterprise business apps that need to change often I know nothing better.
icebraining 10y ago
The company I work for provides services (development, hosting, training, etc) for a (mostly) open source alternative to OutSystems, called Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/ I'm probably biased, but I'd say it's nice for these kinds of enterprise apps. You get a bunch of core modules for free, which you can then adjust to your needs - saving you the time of building yet another stock management app or whatever - and even for new modules, the framework provides most mechanisms for regular CRUD, so you can literally define a class with just the data fields you need and a menu, and all the UI will be generated on-the-fly to let users create/edit/delete records. Then you can extend and override at will. It's not without its flaws, but for building the typical backoffice app, it's a pretty sweet spot between a regular framework that just provides the basic tools and a closed application which you're forced to "configure" with hacks and still only does half of what you need. EDIT: By the way, I don't know about OutSystems, but Odoo is all made and extended in Python (and JS for frontend, but I rarely need to use it).
- zmoreira 10y ago
  Outsystems is more a direct replacement for a traditional IDE and application server. It generates and deploys either .Net or Java code.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Not sure why you are comparing Odoo to Outsystems; I worked with both and I am not really seeing where you get this comparison from?

zmoreira 10y ago

I have been a Outsystems developer for the last 10 years. I feel quite comfortable about my future prospects, but I live in Portugal where Outsystems has 100% penetration in large companies. I think there is no chance of the company going out of business since so many big customers depend on it. The platform is expanding fast and lately it's getting harder to find developers for my teams. Many of the most experienced developers are working on project abroad where rates are much higher (Benelux, the Gulf, United States). As a developer platform it really makes you more productive. I was working with .NET before and I think I became 10 times more productive (of course this could mean that I sucked as a .NET developer). However licensing is expensive, so it's not for every customer and also not for every project. For enterprise business apps that need to change often I know nothing better.

icebraining 10y ago

The company I work for provides services (development, hosting, training, etc) for a (mostly) open source alternative to OutSystems, called Odoo: https://www.odoo.com/ https://www.odoo.com/ I'm probably biased, but I'd say it's nice for these kinds of enterprise apps. You get a bunch of core modules for free, which you can then adjust to your needs - saving you the time of building yet another stock management app or whatever - and even for new modules, the framework provides most mechanisms for regular CRUD, so you can literally define a class with just the data fields you need and a menu, and all the UI will be generated on-the-fly to let users create/edit/delete records. Then you can extend and override at will. It's not without its flaws, but for building the typical backoffice app, it's a pretty sweet spot between a regular framework that just provides the basic tools and a closed application which you're forced to "configure" with hacks and still only does half of what you need. EDIT: By the way, I don't know about OutSystems, but Odoo is all made and extended in Python (and JS for frontend, but I rarely need to use it).

zmoreira 10y ago
Outsystems is more a direct replacement for a traditional IDE and application server. It generates and deploys either .Net or Java code.
tluyben2 10y ago
Not sure why you are comparing Odoo to Outsystems; I worked with both and I am not really seeing where you get this comparison from?