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App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta
- kennydude 8y agoThis seems to be a big similarity to Zoho with their Zoho Creator software
- rahimnathwani 8y agoDuring 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 programming language (LotusScript, with almost the same syntax as VB), I was often able to build what I needed with just the GUI tools and a few formulae (roughly equivalent to formulae in Excel). There are a lot of Lotus Notes haters. I think the majority were put off by the email experience, which is very different from other systems. But the ease of developing, deploying, updating and using internal-only workflow applications was truly awesome. I hope App Maker is as easy to set up, for simple use cases at least.
- mcroft 8y agoI always got the impression that Lotus Notes was a great idea, but very poorly implemented. The concepts in it were good, it was just a shame it inflicted so much suffering.
- wycy 8y agoWhat aspects of Lotus Notes seemed like a good idea? Genuine question. I remember being horrified by almost everything about Lotus Notes. Sametime was great, though.
- slantyyz 8y agoI'll bite... 1 - Document Store (iirc, CouchDB was inspired by Notes/Domino) 2 - Replication - even past the 90s, it was one of the best tools for disconnected users 3 - Low barrier to application creation (it was about as easy as building something in Filemaker Pro) 4 - Easy publication of applications to the web (this was BEFORE 2000, so kind of a big deal back then) 5 - Administration of servers was pretty easy 6 - LotusScript (similar to vba) let you go much further than the prebuilt formula language (if you were willing to learn it) Keep in mind, these benefits were available pre-2000, and in that time many were strong competitive advantages.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoReplication was huge, we didn't even have an internet connection when I setup a application replicating between three suppliers and a bank.
- slantyyz 8y agoYeah, when I first started to use Notes, using modems over POTS lines to call HQ was still a thing, so that replication was a big deal. Hell, I don't even think all laptops had ethernet ports back then either. In a lot of cases, you had to buy PCMCIA cards for that.
- kirbypineapple 8y agoI realized how great Sametime was after I was forced to move to Skype for Business. The meeting functionality wasn't great but there were other great features. I sorely miss the button that allowed you to drag a rectangle on your screen and it would automatically send the resulting screen capture as a message. Not as an attachment that you had to open up, an actual image in the chat. Why can't skype figure that out!?
- rahimnathwani 8y agoI still wish for a widely-deployed replacement for Notes/Domino. Sure, I can build CRUDish apps with Django, but there are simple use-cases that take me a week with Django, that would have been a day with Notes. It's crazy that things are slower for me 20 years later. I'm pretty sure I'm not dumber now.
- slantyyz 8y agoDoes Filemaker Pro solve that problem?
- rahimnathwani 8y agoI have never used it, but it's no longer available as of last month: http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-pro/ http://www.filemaker.com/products/filemaker-pro/ "FileMaker Pro is no longer available. It has been replaced by FileMaker Pro Advanced which includes more features to help you develop and deploy custom apps faster and more efficiently."
- slantyyz 8y agoIIRC, File Maker Pro Advanced is basically FileMaker Pro with additional features enabled. You would be able to use that in its place, but it might have a higher price tag.
- Drakim 8y agoTools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize. But just like excel, it's a double edged sword, as people "specialize" in it and create monstrous abomination applications way larger than the tool is fit to sustain. It becomes a rat maze of gotchas and obscure tricks, and nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on.
- tribby 8y ago> nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on. perl devs used to refer to this as job security :)
- panic 8y ago> nobody but the original creator really knows what's going on That’s true of most “serious” codebases too! Writing code that others can understand takes time and expertise (both expensive), and it’s often not worth it for one-off tools.
- oldcynic 8y agoA friend of mine spent a very lucrative few years in the late 90s, early 00s doing Excel contracting. Usually for banks who seemed to have quite a lot of these monstrous abominations and a wish to make them far more monstrous going by conversations back then. Paid for their Porsche 911 until the .com bust broke contracting generally.
- slantyyz 8y ago>> Tools like that can be extremely productive, and easy for people of no or low programming ability to utilize. Absolutely. BUT, in the early days, the value of return for end users is higher than the cost of development and maintenance. If the tool is useful and grows, it's going to flip where the cost of development and maintenance is higher the the return, and some tough decisions need to be made.
- Pamar 8y agoHi, 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.
- wslh 8y agoSpeed vs reliability is a common tradeoff in the workplace. Everyone hates the apps or tools that were built before you start working.
- Pamar 8y agoIn 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.
- prepend 8y agoI 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 a myth as functionality and use is frequently, in my experience, new based on the spreadsheet and users don’t tell this to the design team; 3) the cost of properly designing all 20 is enormous so trying to pick only the most likely 5 is still expensive and has a decent probability of producing zero useful systems. So while it sucks to be the engineer cleaning up some yahoo’s hack that got used by the CEO, I’m not sure what the solution is that is best for the enterprise.
- prepend 8y agoI 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 entirely different license and then showed me how to do my survey. It took more development time and somehow had an even worse UI than Lotus. So there is stuff worse than Lotus, and I think that enterprises do need some simple way for non-devs to make modules or apps or whatnot that they can integrate into workflows. Basically like Access was in the early days where normies would make databases for paper stuff. The idea that a non-dev should hire people for simple data collection and analysis, while nice philosophically to me as a dev, is pretty crazy in the long run as it doesn’t scale.
- rahimnathwani 8y agoIf 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.
- prepend 8y agoThat’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.
- fpgaminer 8y agoVery similarly was HyperCard. It was a bit before my time, but reading up on it, it seemed so powerful and yet friendly for non-programmers to use to make useful tools. For a demonstration of HyperCard's power, play the original Myst some time. The original Myst runs on HyperCard (the Mac versions anyway; it obviously had to be ported for Windows and other releases). Incredible. I struggle to think of tools like these that exist today. Access, perhaps? (and of course the tool in the article)
- threatofrain 8y agoIn many ways I think this is what Microsoft Access should've been.
- Angostura 8y agoWell, its more like what Sharepoint tries to be.
- mmjaa 8y agoIts actually what Visix Vibe used to be. In computing we are constantly re-inventing things we threw away..
- petepete 8y agoIt's what SharePoint is. Except that by the time you've fought through the awful tooling, horrible performance and useless documentation just to do simple things you've forgotten (or no longer care) about what the original problem you were trying to solve was. This looks much better. Hopefully it's not a Wave-esque Google hobby.
- Angostura 8y agoI agree with you entirely. The awful tooling and and useless documentation are exactly why it is trying yet failing. The whole thing feels like some kind of amateur hobbyist bit of software where people have kinda-sorta implemented a feature, then got bored and wandered off.
- pjmlp 8y agoI don't touch it as developer since the 2010 version, but it appears to have been rebooted multiple times.
- ratnakarsays 8y agogreat
- bitcharmer 8y agoYay, another product Google will pull out few months after businesses start using (depending on) it.
- mleonard 8y agoSays it supports CloudSQL? Does it support Cloud Datastore / Firestore or are they on the road map does anyone know?
- cottsak 8y agoHow will this not become hell on earth for software developers, al-la Microsoft Access, Oracle APEX, etc.. ??
- mvdwoord 8y agoJust say no. Developers should recognize when a tool no longer fits the problem space and move on. That does not invalidate the other usecases in any way. Not everyone is a developer, not every problem needs to scale. Unfortunately, yes, this will become hell for some. Job security for others and ..
- jarfil 8y agoIf it doesn't lock in data access like MS Access did, it could be seen as just an interface designer. Whatever data it gets fed, could be migrated from a simple database to a proper backend if such need arises. It could even coexist with other front-ends. As long as it doesn't let too much business logic to be programed into it without a simple way to extract it, it shouldn't be a problem.
- p_l 8y agoThe problem isn't that Access locked in data, it was that people stuck with MS JET engine instead of hooking ODBC server properly - then Access became a funky, useful UI tool for databases.
- agentdrtran 8y agoThe default datasource is a regular Google SQL server, so if you want to change something later on, just plug the DB credentials into your new thing. There's no lock-in.
- bitmapbrother 8y agoHaving used Access a few times I find it hard to believe how anything could be worse than that anti-productive, database corrupting, File Already in Use piece of garbage. It's astounding that they're still updating it.
- polskibus 8y agoI wonder if Google will deliberately feed the App Maker backlog with features that enable building functionalities from apps that are hosted on Google Cloud? That could undercut some of their customers to the benefit of other customers.
- morog 8y agoI for one am quite excited about app maker. Finally a CRUD tool that links to just about any data source (including spreadsheets), does not require desktop software, generates properly responsive applications, needs no maintenance or upgrades to be secure and will presumably be compatible with Google forms.
- bsbechtel 8y agoI think Microsoft PowerApps does all that you described, and has been around for a while now.
- mkane848 8y agoI recently started learning PowerApps due to work and yeah, this seems like Google's "answer" for lack of a better term. I feel like one of the main draws for PA is that it's got a lot of integration with O365 and the rest of the MS suite, but does Google have the same sort of enterprise presence to make this a realistic competitor for market space?
- agentdrtran 8y agoIt's not responsive like you think, none of the templates work right on mobile. It's very much designed for desktops.
- freekh 8y agoDon't want to sound overly negative but for some reason this makes me think of SharePoint. I'm sure it's nothing like it though :)
- candiodari 8y agoThis is Google. We know it'll be one of two things : 1) it'll be convoluted like you wouldn't believe, and enforce an entire nonsensical 20-tier architecture on you. It'll be forced on everyone for decades and grow and grow and grow, with 20 different versions deployed which all support and/or require seemingly random combinations of those 20 tiers (ie. android) 2) It'll be great, fantastic, simple and work ! Oh, and it'll be canceled before sundown. And of course there will be absolutely no-one who ever answers a single question about it, ever.
- bigato 8y agoAfter 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 to actually program.
- royjacobs 8y agoBut a lot of apps nowadays are essentially just forms to send data to a backend. If those apps can be 'trivially' made then that's a clear win, I'd say? It will certainly not replace a lot of complex applications, but if you just want a quick "order a mouse at the internal servicedesk" app then what's the harm?
- lostcolony 8y agoIf the needs never change and are 100% addressed by the app maker, fine. In my experience that never happens, though, and you either have an incredibly painful process trying to work around the limitations of the app maker, or you end up with a rewrite anyway.
- commandlinefan 8y ago> a lot of apps nowadays are essentially just forms to send data to a backend That was true 30 years ago, when VB was popular, too. Heck, that was true 50 years ago, when CICS was popular. "Forms to send data to a backend" is deceptively complex.
- fauigerzigerk 8y agoTrue, but there are many people who can handle consistent logic but are not familiar with all the technical detail required for general purpose software development. There is a lot of complexity that is completely unrelated to the core logic of a solution to a particular problem.
- 8y ago
- pjmlp 8y ago> any other database that supports JDBC Did they implement the JDBC p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ API in JavaScript?! EDIT: Apparently they did exactly that, https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/jdbc/ https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/jdbc/
- tzahola 8y agoAnother iteration of the "managers creating programs by connecting boxes" pipe dream. I pity the engineers in advance, whose job will be rewriting the horrendous "enterprise apps" this tool will leave behind at the end of its life. Time is a flat circle.
- pavlov 8y agoI suspect Google App Maker will end up effectively abandoned like Google Web Designer: https://www.google.com/webdesigner/ 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.
- ratsimihah 8y agoTo add some subjective constructive feedback, I think the idea behind App maker is crap.
- esrauch 8y agoCan you explain why the idea is crap? Broadly it seems bad if it takes a software developer to make even the most trivial app.
- konradb 8y agoI'm also interested in why you think it is a crap idea as opposed to complaints about the implementation or UI.
- ratsimihah 8y agoI 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."
- SirYandi 8y agoPerhaps 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!
- projectramo 8y agoIsn’t Google scripts, forms, tables and drive already a Google App maker?
- candiodari 8y agoGoogle is a huge company. You might wonder what that has to do with anything, but ... after years of frustration let me just state with absolute certainty: With VERY few exceptions (like, say, the build system or some backend infrastructure) EVERY Google project has essentially it's own private structure, base libraries, framework and things that look extremely close ... aren't really. Also, even components of the same app don't use the same framework throughout. It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't just the case that Docs and Sheets aren't written in the same language but that the drawings you can embed in both are implemented in yet another language.
- zeisss 8y agoMy first IT job was building apps with Oracle Forms. To this day I miss the ease of creating a UI and some simple database tables with it. Sadly this requires a GSuite accounts, so it is hard to try out.
- thrav 8y agoYou’d like Salesforce
- zenovision 8y agoIn the past years Google has deprecated more than 100 services, so I will never trust them to build any software using their proprietary stack.
- shawn 8y agoDoes it matter that App Maker is only available with a G Suite business subscription? I'm skeptical too, but at least this is (indirectly) a paid product.
- blisterpeanuts 8y agoThat's the key point. It's going to be a revenue producer from Day One. The question is, how long will G Suite itself last (as a paid service)? If AMZN or MSFT come out with equivalent services for free or very cheap, GOOG may reciprocate, and bang, no more revenue.
- bigato 8y agoI agree from the standpoint of a user of a service, but that's just how it is nowadays because they work like a giant startup incubator. Several ideas are tried, as many as possible, as fast as possible, and some are worth for them to keep. Most are not. At least if it is opensource, if Google abandons it but it still is useful for a reasonable number of people, one can hope that a community will form and take over development.
- deklerk 8y ago[citation needed]
- zenovision 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discontinued_products_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products#Discon...
- zenovision 8y ago24 deprecated services in 2018 alone (in just 6 months...)
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sparrish 8y agoI look forward to the consulting revenue I'll be making rebuilding the apps created by App Maker in about 3 years, when Google shuts it down.
- agentdrtran 8y agoIt's a G Suite product, they aren't going to treat it like Allo.
- avenueb 8y agoQuick Base has been running its no code platform for almost 2 decades and does not tie you to an information or vendor silo - happy to integrate with many cloud and data integrations.
- wwwdonohue 8y agoTired of having the services and products you like deprecated and abandoned? Now you can build your own services on a platform that will end up deprecated and abandoned!
- agentdrtran 8y agoI've built a production app internally with app maker and it's quite nice, but you do need to know more than the bare basics of SQL/JS to really be effective with it.
- spankalee 8y agoI 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 custom software - not having to find and convince engineers to build something for you - is really important as software becomes critical to the long tail of business processes that have still been powered by paper, spreadsheets, emails, chat, etc...
- neovive 8y agoCongratulations 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?
- j45 8y agoCongrats, my hope is something like this can become a more usable MS Access replacement.
- spankalee 8y agoThat's the idea. I did a bunch of FileMaker consulting before getting my CS degree and joining Google, so a lot of the ideas are based on that type of tool, but thinking of how to do it better: Client and server side scripting with real JS, multiple nested data-contexts per page, multiple data backends, etc.