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.
Any such application builder is really just implementing a new visual programming language. This means creating application builders comes with all the associated pros and cons of creating new programming languages but unfortunately most people don't realize that.
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.
I came to the same conclusion 15 years ago when working in web dev. Your customer wants to run their own web site, so you build them a CMS. They want it to be more flexible so you add features. They want to be able to script and style and alter the layout and and and... you've looped right back around and what they really want is Apache + PHP.
5 comments
2 u/Past9 [OP] 18 Jun 2016 03:03
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.
1 u/blueingreen 18 Jun 2016 05:19
Any such application builder is really just implementing a new visual programming language. This means creating application builders comes with all the associated pros and cons of creating new programming languages but unfortunately most people don't realize that.
0 u/Past9 [OP] 18 Jun 2016 05:37
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.
0 u/tame 20 Jun 2016 07:16
I came to the same conclusion 15 years ago when working in web dev. Your customer wants to run their own web site, so you build them a CMS. They want it to be more flexible so you add features. They want to be able to script and style and alter the layout and and and... you've looped right back around and what they really want is Apache + PHP.
0 u/Past9 [OP] 20 Jun 2016 08:33
Yep. But they never want to learn it :/