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Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently? When I
by redsymbol 5y ago
Some people here are giving examples of using Bubble a few years ago, and found it too limited to be useful. Have any developers here used it recently?
When I first looked at Zapier about 2.5 years ago, as a developer I found it limiting and just not useful compared to writing custom webhooks that I sometimes glued together with cron jobs, etc. But since late last year, Zapier has matured so much I am able to use it for almost every integration I need. It has probably saved me ~100 hours of development time in the past year alone.
I wonder if Bubble might have passed a similar threshold of utility, so that it is useful even to people who DO have good coding skills.
- cam-perry 5y agoYep. My partner is non technical and has been using Bubble since October. I have great impressions. The responsiveness editor could be better, or maybe just better documented. As a developer, you can't come in thinking you'll just get it. Bubble has renamed things for simplicity to non-technical folks and you need to take the time to learn their system. Something I found great is Bubble's API Connector plugin and their REST Data API to. It lets you to call out to external APIs and CRUD into the bubble database. When my partner's app had a bit of "complex" backend logic that couldnt be easily done in the Bubble UI, I wrote a lambda function and they call it using the Bubble UI. Bubble has been great for them. As their product / company grow that may not always be the case. But I think it'll hold up for longer than most developers believe, well beyond the initial prototype phase.
- redsymbol 5y agoThanks, this is the exact kind of intel I was looking for. Especially that they have a API connector and REST API - I was betting they DID have that, as it's a moderately easy thing for them to ad that makes custom extensions possible. (With Zapier, I have used their so-called "Webhook" connector for that - set up an endpoint on my webapp that accepts a POST with a JSON payload, then make a zap that send data there in response to some trigger.)
- arihant 5y agoYes, last moth. Bubble is such a nightmare to use and learn that it’s simply easier to learn something like Vue with Firebase. Just to get a basic value from JavaScript code to display in UI, you need to put together this weird pipeline sort of logic. The back end requests aren’t really back end, the logic is still front end regardless of where the code is executed. The result is there is no way to implement a queue. Using an API that rate limits, can’t use it in Bubble. For API calls things have to map into their weird data types and in their world, a phone number is an integer. But the biggest issue is that learning curve is even higher than tools like react. And the steps to do basic things are so tiresome it’s just easier to write code. UI prototyping is fast, sure. But not much faster than tailwind.
- jollybean 5y agoZapier is mostly targetted at non marketing people and I wouldn't even think to write my own hooks otherwise. You want something pushed into a spreadsheet when you receive an email? That's Zapier.
- redsymbol 5y agoWould not characterize it this way. I mainly use Zapier for marketing automation tasks, as do quite a few other people - regardless of whether that is what it is "aimed" at, marketing is a major use case for zapier in practice. Pushing something into a spreadsheet is certainly a widely used zapier idiom. In 2021, it is capable of far more complex tasks, though.