From Bubble & Excited!

Wappler General Praise
#1

Hello!

Hope you all are well!
This post isn’t important, its just my thoughts after few days of wappler.
This is my first post, & my name is Haydn, from the land down under :smiley:

I just wanted to say I’m very bloody excited to try out this platform, I recently signed up a few days ago and have just been reading a lot of community posts, docs, and starting tutorials, and I have been blown away by the absolute level of knowledge and skill from the community members and by far the team in wappler, which from my understanding is only 3 people.

Reading the releases, involvement in the community, and the documents, I don’t know how the wappler team has been able to do all of this, and have such regular feature releases. No there isn’t as much documentation/community involvement when compared to bubble, but my god the knowledge of the individuals, and I’m sure that will more than make up for it.

Is there a donation or buy a coffee sort of thing set up for the wappler team? As I said I’m completely blown away, & would love to show my appreciation (hence this whole post too)
I’m hoping this is going to go very well for me, and if it does, when I believe I have a bit of experience and knowledge, ill do my best to help out in the community too :slight_smile:

I actually attempted to move fully away from bubble.io to code (next.js), and was quite rough, I believe I could do it, but not without massively delaying my development speed. Wappler seems to be a perfect middle group, where I can move away from no code, and seriously start to learn code as well, where I can implement what I need visually while also seeing how it’s done in code directly. Which is going to be insanely valuable for me.

Just some random notes & thoughts below of wappler:

  • Some major issues I was running into with bubble, I can already see solutions/methods to be able to do in wappler without any dodgy workaround like I would have had too in bubble.io, or just straight up couldn’t.

  • The editor speed is crazy quick compared to bubble.io, because it’s not web-based. Bubble with my app, it was common to wait for like few seconds for action/inputs, which absolutely destroyed my flow.

  • I saw wappler like 6 months ago, and completely skipped it simply because the team/community seemed a lot smaller, I was worried about vendor lock it/long-term viability because I assumed hosting was also locked in like bubble.io, I wish I had done little more research to understand its an editor. So the way I look at that is there isn’t much worry about vendor locking it, only worry about future updates may stop if something goes wrong, but with the team’s history of like 2 decades or so, I’m not too worried :slight_smile: & also will have code in github so will always be useful compared to bubble.io json app download.

I have a lot more id love to say but don’t want to waste anyone’s time :slight_smile:

If any of you are curious, my current app on bubble.io is dash.imageedits.com
My main pains for bubble:

  • overall speed of app (absolutely slow as shit on bubble (likely a lot of my fault too as I started from web development understanding)
  • Reusability
  • Using Objects
  • Actually figuring out what best practices are, as from a lot of my research guides are more surface level, not so much about proper efficient building for the bubble ecosystem.
  • Error Handling

But in saying that, I do love bubble, I wouldn’t be here without it, and its amazing, but I do believe for my needs & personal growth, I am hoping wappler will give me confidence to go to the next level :slight_smile:

Cheers Haydn

22 Likes
#2

Welcome to this community! You won’t regret it.

3 Likes
#3

WELCOME ABOARD! I invite you to keep an eye on the Coffee Lounge for details about our Monthly MeetUps at 4:00PM Netherlands on the first Friday of each month. Next MeetUp is scheduled for Friday August 5th. Best of luck with your future development!

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#4

Hi Haydn, I enjoyed that you shared your hopes and experience so far! How have you been doing with Wappler? My first month was rough, because I really wasn’t sure what Wappler was at first. It sounds like you already understood that, so I’m excited to hear how it’s going.

I know what you mean when you say so many things on Bubble solutions end up relying on dodgy workarounds. Simple stuff like text input would require days of development to get working as expected on multiple devices, and essential plugins would drop dead like flies with no explanation. Bubble tied my hands in so many ways, and the freedom Wappler provides can be daunting but is empowering.

I’ve enjoyed getting back into the mindset of hands-on web development.

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#5

@Hinky,

With wappler you can be sure that you will rediscover many things and move you forward . There are also amazing people in this community .

welcome to this community !!! :partying_face:

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#6

Hey Nomad!

Sadly, ive had alot of business stuff to do, so haven’t had as much time as id like, but I’ve learnt a hell of a lot so far. Its good I feel like I’m actually learning proper best practices when it comes to building a project, where as on bubble.io I was like not sure what best practices are nor really room for good control. Like my bubble.io does so many damn calls to database, but with this I can just cache the calls that I know that don’t change much, and that alone is going to speed my app up so much. Also the control of deciding what to actually send back to client is huge instead of relying on database privacy rules alone which were difficult to manage with fine permissions. Then also a actual true spa in wappler, where as on bubble.io from what i can tell you just chuck everything on one page, and conditional render it, which if im understanding correctly wappler. if only sends what is require for the content part not everything at once, i think. So should be signficantly quicker.

One of biggest issues i had with wrapppler was understand how to pass from client side to backend, because in bubble.io you manually select what you want to send in each call, which i think you can do that with wappler api calls but using server connect, the form is the object/inputs sending to backend, that too me a bit to understand but now it seems really simple to use.

Past week for me on bubble.io was a nightmare, I had more issues in 1 week than I had in 1.5 years, and all of it was out of my control, they were simple things, example unpkg went down, and since I didn’t have access to plugin code, I couldn’t change the cdn quickly, and since they were community plugins, the support was none existent basically.

At the moment I haven’t started to create my app yet, I’ve just been trying to figure out best practices, and once I get the workflow I like, I should be able to start flying hopefully. Ive been writing my own little documentation for wappler of just common questions I’m running into and the answer/workflows I’ve come up with. Because I don’t want to flood this forum with questions, I’ve had few hundred questions so far haha
But I’m thinking I might share my questions and such in post in future, and solutions I’ve come up with as might help people coming from bubble.io, but not too sure if I want to do that, as I’m not very experienced and don’t want to steer people in wrong direction. Like my bubble.io app, man I made so many basic errors interms of good practices.

only thing i think ill really miss from bubble.io is the immutable naming, like in bubble.io you can chance the name of things so easily with no issues, but i dont think that is possible for wappler to do, because the id in wappler since it can be coded, need to be the same as the name so human can remeber it in, where as bubble.io the id are just random string i think, which youd never be able to code with, but thats my basic understanding.

#7

Howdy
What bubble monthly pricing were you on?
I’ve always wondered when people thought bubble is slow, is it because they were on the free tier?
Or did you think the development was slow?

#8

@Robert_LM

(edit: should say my website portal, not a general marketing website)

Oh bubble.io, i currently have a live app, you can look at if you’d like
dash.imageedits.com
Im on the monthly professional monthly package, which is 115 USD a month I think. I barely am above 5% CPU usage, so its not a hardware capacity issue. (its mainly for extra versions and some other benefits I forget, one thing im also worried about is bubble.io looking to change their pricing to more pay for what you use, but like tracking database records which will just sky rocket pricing for me)

Performance wise I mean its not horrible, my goal is get it to point where its instant page changing due to caching, opposed to each page querying the same information that’s used on each load. Example like on each load it loads same data again, so id like change is like if I have a list of orders, and I click on one to edit the order details, and then after that go back to list page, using the cache list so its a lot more instant. (then like every min or two it updates. But that’s just my thoughts at the moment, I could be totally wrong and might create something significantly slower due to the amount of control ill have and my skill (not wapplers fault). But we will see.
Oh also, hoping that repeating content will be more performant.

Development was a pain, so I started off with single page and all elements on that one page, but that is a sure way to make the editor unuseable, I was getting delays of few seconds between each click and wanting to change something, completely unuseable.
But can be fixed by moving everything into reuseables, but with that sharing data is quite hard, its easy to pass data to reuseable but for reuseable to have access to same data hasn’t been something I’ve been able to work out well. I should also note probs would be better now with their new responsive engine having all elements on one page, since you wont need to set the page height to like 60000 pixels, which is what I was having to do with the old responsive engine.

With wappler, I’m thinking ill just have all the storage in layout, and treat the content pages as reuseables (like in bubble.io) so content pages will have access to all same data in storage, with partials being really basic stuff example a text element when click will be copied to clipboard.

Thats my thought process, again have a lot to learn.
Again id still have a lot to learn in bubble.io, but I am hoping with wappler it will be the best choice in long run interms of developer productivity and also bring on developers since it built more around git, where as bubble.io version control I was having a lot of difficult bring on members and controlling what they can adjust.

Id love anyone opinion on my app and if they think it will be quicker on wappler (of course if done correctly, but from my knowledge I’m thinking it will be significantly quicker)

Oh also should note bubble.io is being out a lot of performance improvements, which should greatly help but that’s more the rendering side of things, example server side HTML generation. I think my biggest issue is the database queries on every page.

Also man I write a lot hahah

1 Like
#9

Thx for taking time to write.
I have a friend who left bubble right after some pricing fiasco 6 months ago (or so).
It a bummer to be in bondage so hope you get free quickly.
I’ll check out the app for sure.

2 Likes
#10

:rofl: Oh wow, we should start a recovery group for ex-Bubblers. I was making myself crazy setting up the data in a way that the DB queries Bubble generated wouldn’t self-destruct the poor server it was running on. I always felt like I was designing a real thing through a Windows-9x-era wizard.

Have you decided on your server and database model? I’ve always heard NodeJS is not well suited for CPU-intensive tasks like image manipulation. Based on the name of your site you might consider if that applies to you (in which case, maybe someone else could advise what to use instead). Example: https://youtu.be/TlB_eWDSMt4?t=566 – Just sharing since so many people recommend Node right off there bat.

Well said. That’s been my entire experience. I hope Wappler will continue its great strides recently toward more streamlined and approachable docs and “first run” experiences. I think a lot of potential users just can’t make it over the initial learning curve, and I was nearly one of them.

Beyond the never-ending Bubble drama, the lack of support or control over most of the plugins was ridiculous. We paid good money every month for plugins for years, only to find out it had a huge security issue that had been reported for years but the developer had walked or was unresponsive.

Even text entry on a Bubble app often needs a plugin to get what a client wants. And then every bit of input on your site is being run through sometimes obscure or opaque code, which breaks or changes without notice. I started to dread seeing any email from clients about web stuff, because the problems were unsolvable on Bubble.

Wappler may not be as easy to start with, but you’re in control the whole way!

I missed this, too. I think this was just one of the thin layers of magic that made Bubble feel so effortless to get started on.

Although everyone finds their own best practices, it sounds like you’re taking a well-advised path! The best products/projects I’ve been a part of started on paper or in sketches rather than inside the development or design app. Although I’ve had to start a few projects directly in my development app before, the results often speak for themselves.

Getting the workflow to be less work and more flow takes some time, but also you might run into a question that takes a few days to get around at first – so it’s always good to do some small projects as you go to be sure you’re not depending on steps to work exactly as shown in a video or guide.

I think you would be amazed at the power you can buy for $115 when you aren’t paying a vendor. The most expensive site I’ve deployed post-Bubble was a $50 database cluster + a $50 dual-server (aka 1 + a backup in case anything went down). So about $100 + tax a month.

I never even registered a blip on the radar of either service doing things that would thrash my professional plan on Bubble. We still have clients using Bubble and when I have to go back and use it, I can’t believe I used to subject myself to developing a website inside another website.

I know you mentioned Bubble not being slow, but FYI the login page for your example gets a 4 from Google light speed. Not trying to shame you (and just for the record, I did visit your site manually first about 30 seconds before the light speed test to be sure Google wasn’t waiting on something to spin up on your Bubble app)

Anyway, I feel you in the sense that your pages LOOK & FEEL amazing for a Bubble app. However, you’ll be hitting unbelievable light speed scores on something made in Wappler.

In our experience, all the SEO and optimization in the world didn’t make up for the very very bad Lightspeed scores. Our rankings often suffered dearly even on a $115 Bubble site using multiple SEO enhancements per the community.

I had no idea the same performance would be a small % of that when running it on my own rented server with clean/leaner code from Wappler.

Good luck to you, and don’t hold back on questions if its a roadblock to you. I nearly didn’t post my setup question and was going to give up, but after that I haven’t hit any dead-ends.

2 Likes
#11

NodeJS is a single-threaded app - that means if you perform heavy CPU usage (such as image processing) such thread will hang until finished, hanging other requests meanwhile.

However, such concerns are negligible because in a environment where you need that kind of performance optimization, you’ll already have multiple instances of your app running at the same time and a load balancer in front. In Docker deployment, this is achieved through the use of the “Replicas” option

5 Likes
#12

Another option is to use Wappler to build the UI and delegate the image processing to something like imaginary which is written in GO and will outperform node/php.

1 Like
#13

Yeah, so I’m not too interested in comparing performance, me personally I know a little bit of javascript and node.js/express, so thought its going to be best just to stick to something I kinda understand, the slowest part of my app is going to be my development speed, not the language. Yeah we do a lot of image manipulation, my quick solution to this was going to have the app seprarte to a image processing app (hosted on heztner for cheaper performance). Currently using azure durable function, but I don’t know it too well, so id like to keep as much as possible in wappler while I learn.
Also going with PostgreSql database, digital ocean hosted.

hahaa wont lie, I’ve been close to that, knowledge jump from bubble.io to wappler has been huge, but in the long run it will be worth it. And If I ever get to that point id like to make some guides that personally helped me when switching from bubble.io to wappler, if I ever get to that level of experience to do that.

hahah no offence taken, trust me im the one that judges my app the most, the beauty of bubble.io is its amazing feeling to get something working, but when you get more experienced and look back, im like damn this is slow af hahah Performance im sure has a lot to do with the way I developed my app, but just changing things in bubble.io has been a nightmare in bubble.io, like refactoring.

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