Yep. But they never want to learn it :/

Exactly. There inevitably comes a need for custom logic, and so the app builder has to become more configurable. Eventually it becomes so configurable that's it's Turing complete.

Yeah, my inspection was cursory so it's possible the source is minified in there somewhere, but I didn't see it. And actually, I think bootstrap is longer than that whole CSS file.

That's actually ideal and best for performance!

That's often the case, but using a higher-level framework can allow certain optimizations. Take React and its Virtual DOM, for example. Whenever you update your models, it calculates what the new DOM tree should look like, then calculates a diff from the current DOM and only updates the elements that have changed. I suppose one could do that with hand-coded JavaScript, but God help them.

You got me curious so I did a little sleuthing.

If you're using Chrome, you can hit F12 to bring up the developer tools and go to the Sources tab. If you look under the "bundles" folder, you can see that there are two JavaScript files. One is called "bootstrap", but I believe it's just for "bootstrapping" the UI--it's not Twitter Bootstrap.

The only CSS I can see is under Content > Dark. It looks to me like it's all custom CSS.

You can paste the main javascript bundle into an unminifier (just Google "javascript unminify"). All I see is jQuery and raw JS. No fancy MVC frameworks.

This is my own blog. It's not meant as spam, but if posting your own articles here is strictly verboten, someone let me know and I'll take it down.

Otherwise, I'd love to hear your thoughts! Has anyone else been tasked to write an application builder? I had to help build one at a recent job, and a guy on my team said (woefully) that he'd built numerous ones. Seems like this is a common idea among non-technical managers, but I've never met a developer who thought it was a good idea.