How Fast Can You Build Apps? And Career Advice for a Newbie Developer

Coffee Lounge
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My experience of development is limited to using Filemaker to build apps and duck taping things together with WordPress, Zapier, Make.com ect.

What made me interested in learning Wappler is while Filemaker is great for internal business apps, in it, the web isn’t a first class citizen, and building a SAAS company out of is totally out of scope.

I was looking for the equivalent of what Filemaker offered but for the Web. I initially stumbled onto Bubble before joining here.

I’m still extremely green to Wappler but it looks very promising.

But beyond Wappler I’ve also considered picking up traditional development. And the pros and cons of each.

Does Wappler Really 2-10x Your Productivity?

One thing that is very promising to me is how fast people say they can develop in Wappler. That was always a plus for me with working with Filemaker. Even with my limited coding skills I could bash something together and hook it up to any API I wanted imaginable in short order and have something useful that our small business could use to solve everyday problems.

For the most experienced devs with a traditional coding background, has Wappler really 2-10x sped up your workflow?

How would you rate your traditional coding skills before picking up Wappler? Do you think a better programmer could keep up with your development speed with just raw coding even though you have Wappler?

Are there projects where you’d consider forgoing Wappler and build something out with a tradional coding tech stack? Where are the edge cases?

If I wanted to pick up traditional coding, how would that best be paired with learning Wappler. Where and how are you using traditional coding in your Wappler projects? Ect.

I’m looking to be able to rapidly develop solutions for the company I work for and put personal side projects together but also expanding my development skills as much as humanly possible in the next 3-5 years.

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Yes

Yes

I started coding in assembly language back in the early 70’s. Progressed through Pascal to Basic, C and various other languages. My first commercial website was using ColdFusion before adopting PHP. Now I love the NodeJS environment, not because of my limited knowledge of JavaScript, but because of Wappler.

My initial use of Wappler saw me continue using my PHP coding skills. That is what I was used to doing, coding in Code View.

Then I realised that even better code was being created by Wappler by following the user interface. Not only was it better coding practices, it was a lot faster. That is not where the advantage stopped. I was also used to testing my code for errors and vulnerabilities. Ok, testing my apps is still done, but the coding errors have disappeared drastically reducing my testing time.

I could keep going on and on. All I can say is: “Welcome to the fold”.

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For me it made development more enjoyable - can’t really say anything about time as I haven’t measured those metrics

Very good :slightly_smiling_face:

Yes, I particularly deal with a lot of data and data processing, and Wappler isn’t really the best at that - be it lack of performance or bugs when handling less usual data structures. In my day job I use Go and I’m very happy with it. For standard web development I still use Wappler. Also, I couldn’t see myself building Facebook’s back-end with Wappler, Laravel still has better practices (e.g.: ORM) than Wappler in my opinion (except for the front-end, Wappler would be fine for that)

It’s my opinion one should learn how “real” developers build web apps, so they can later understand the limitations of Wappler or even work around and create Wappler extensions.
I come from a Laravel (PHP) background, so for that you have Laracasts and Codecourse. You could also learn something else like Flask. Actually, go on Youtube and search for the CS50 playlist, and you’ll learn some of the foundations of computer science and web development along the way :slight_smile:

Meet Wappler extensions:

Personally, I still use regular coding for building some internal APIs that are then connected like through HTTP (Wappler’s API Action), because of that data processing thing I do.

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Have a look at what John (@scalaris) has managed to build using Wappler.

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@ben, what @scalaris has done and been willing to share is super inspirational and an impressive use of wappler.

I was just hoping to stir up a little more discussion in that vein about how Wappler has positively impacted their workflow and and maybe what they were doing before.

@ben I know wappler uses server connect/app connect frameworks. That being said, if I’m understanding what you’re saying, when you were using the PHP server model, you were also able to write boilerplate PHP code? I imagine then with the NodeJS server model I could write vanilla javascript in the code view if whatever reason I needed to. Or am I actually right in that I’d need to use @JonL write javascript extension for that?

I’m certainly thrilled at the idea of being able to extend wappler and it being extensible.

It’s hard as a new person in this field.

For one, although I will pretend to know very little, it seems from the outside that a lot of people on youtube that teach or have anything to do with coding get too infatuated with the tech and lose sight of actually using the framework/code ect to solve real problems.

@Apple to build off of what you said. Let’s say I build an app in wappler with this setup.

Bootstrap
App Connect (Their variant of a Vue, React, Angular Equivalent framework)
Server Connect (Express JS or PHP Server Framework Equivalent)
NodeJS
Postgresql

I had thought about watching tutorials on those underlying technologies and then maybe something similar to Server Connect/App Connect like react ect?

Maybe then having a better understanding of those tools would help me appreciate more what wappler is doing and use them in a more constructive way? Maybe spend some time learning design patterns that can be applied with wappler or any other dev environment?

But It’s hard. I want to push what I know so that the circle of problems I can solve increases, but I know if I don’t apply what I learned immediately on a project basis I’ll forget it. The catch 22 is, sometimes you often don’t know that a solution is even possible or in the realm of reason if you don’t have enough knowledge of the tools.

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Honestly, all you need is CS50 and getting started with Wappler :slight_smile:

Wappler abstracts a lot under the hood, like NodeJS you won’t ever touch the core files, so I wouldn’t spend much time learning NodeJS. You could search for a NodeJS + Express video (Express is a framework) to learn the basics such as routing, but I wouldn’t spend much time on it. Learning Javascript could be a valuable skill-set though

For PostgreSQL you can check the CS50 videos

It’s helpful to have a general sense of real web dev tools, but definitely don’t go too serious on them. I wouldn’t spend any time learning Vue/React/Angular because I can’t see how it would help you, but if you really want to try that kind of stuff outside Wappler you could check AlpineJS

Also, it’s helpful to learn a bit of HTML

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Hi! I can’t compare Wappler to fully coding a web app from scratch as when I started with Wappler I had 0 coding skills.

All I can say is that Wappler allowed me to build everything that I imagined to build till now very quickly, and I built a quite complex SaaS. The performance is great

What was surprising is that Wappler also made me an actual (still very beginner) developer, it made me understand coding and inspired me to learn Javascript / Nodejs to a point that I’m very comfortable building extensions and integrations now, never imagined myself being able to do that when I started with Wappler

@Apple Sorry for a different subject in this post, I’m planning to build very data intensive api’s soon, and from my research GO seems to perform much faster compared to Nodejs etc. Do you think that I should try to build the data intensive api’s in GO outside of Wappler and connect with the api connector? And if so, do you have recommendations on frameworks to learn with GO?

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Hi, have you looked at the “Wappler road map for 2022-2023”?
George (CEO) mentioned that “new server models” (support for GO) will be implemented but not in a short term.

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Hi! Yes I noticed but I don’t think it will happen within 6-12 months, and then it will probably need a couple more months to stabilise / add features

Anyway was just thinking to build api’s with GO specifically for heavy data stuff + learning something new. Wappler with Nodejs is more than enough for 95% of what I need

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Hi,

In my case, I choose building APIs with Go when I start to notice things are getting messy in Wappler. Because Go is a typed programming language, it’s easy to define data structures (e.g.: of a JSON) and perform operations in it. I don’t have to worry about Wappler’s UI not following my less-usual structures and I use Visual Studio Code’s Intellisense (with the Go extension) to get auto-complete.

These tools are useful to convert JSON to Go structures:
https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/
https://json2struct.mervine.net/

Regarding frameworks, lately I’ve been using this one because it’s similar to NodeJS’ Express:

That framework uses a non-standard HTTP server, it might be faster than Go’s native net/http server but it might also complicate debugging when your code breaks. At the moment I’m ok with such risk.

Other framework alternatives that are generally well-known and use the standard net/http server are:

This one’s “idiomatic”, meaning it aims to follow Go’s official net/http design pattern:

Something to be aware is the Go community is not very fond of frameworks, unlike other programming languages, so ideally you’d stick to a framework that’s “idiomatic” (chi), but in the end it’s a balance between “idiomatic” and “productive” you have to choose, so that’s why I’ve been using Fiber for my latest projects

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Thanks for the information! Will try to create something with chi then while learning

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@ben Forgive me if I’m prying, but I don’t think you’ve ever mentioned what you’ve used wappler to build stuff for. Maybe in a general sense if you don’t feel like sharing. Did you end up building a SAAS, build internal apps for your organization, or end up doing freelance like website building?

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@Temoran Hi, Alex!

There is also another important thing that you must keep in mind, when deciding either go Wappler or regular programming.

Who will keep maintaining your project when you for some reason can’t do it?

There are some scenarios when it may happen:

  • After couple of month after you finish the project, old client write you that they needed new improvements, but you already busy with new client;
  • You have time to do new tasks for the old client, but your pay grade now not comfortable for them;
  • You don’t feel like you and client on the same page no more;
  • You just want to change the project you working on, to try something new;
  • etc.

There would be a huge problem finding a replacement, especially for an affordable rate.

And also it would be hard to find people if you decide to form a team instead of working solo.

So, no matter how promising Wappler or another tool is, if this tool isn’t popular enough, you have a high risk of facing addressed problems.

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I create whatever my clients ask for. In most cases these are just normal websites to that give their business a presence on the web. Sometimes these are e-commerce sites.

The latest website is a fly-off from a complete Occupational Health and Safety System that I created for the state’s Automobile Chamber of Commerce many years ago. This was an online system that was supposed to be used by their members. Some did use it, others found it a waste of time because it took away from their core business.

The latest application has been narrowed down to only offering Worker Induction as in

image
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This is the template for the role which can then be printed to consequently be filled out by hand

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It also has a library of references

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All very simple and fast to create using Wappler.

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Hi Ben,

this looks great! How did you integrate the PDF preview?

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Hi Marcel,

I used <iframe src="URL"></iframe>.

For the PCM’s this was

<iframe dmx-bind:src="'/assets/safeshop/folder/PCMs/'+ddPCM.data.name" class="oncanvas" dmx-show="ddPCM.data"></iframe>

See https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/iframe for more.

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@ben Super impressive. Sharp and clean build. Thanks for sharing Ben. The more projects I see like this, the more inspired I am to use the tool to its fullest. Do you have any ballpark of what you think something like that would have taken for you in raw PHP vs. Wappler?

So I believe I’ve discovered why I’m so on the fence.

I guess my fear is in my own eyes I’ll feel like I’m never a “real” developer. Which maybe sounds silly… I Know.

Or rather… is Wappler a secret weapon or does it become a crutch I’d want to keep secret from people.

Do you feel like someone new is going to still become a developer in their own right and pick up skills that would transfer over to other frameworks over time?

The last fear. I’m worried about becoming overly reliant on it and the tool goes away. Maybe the wappler team is hit by a bus, or whatever.

I know the source code will still run on our servers, which is awesome, but obviously all development would stop with the Wappler IDE if it’s no longer supported. So essentially anything we’ve built would probably have to be rebuilt sooner or later.

What would you guys do if Wappler disappeared tomorrow?

Again sorry for the hard or negative questions, these are just the primarily things I’ve worried about.

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Hi Alex,

VSCode vs Wappler equates to 1 month vs 1 week (approx)

Join the club

Yes. The IoT (Internet of Things) is an ever changing environment.

Start using VSCode.

The code produced by Wappler is industry compliant. This means that any editor (even Notepad) can be used to maintain a website that was initially created using Wappler.

New projects would need a different approach.

See: TikTok - Make Your Day :sunglasses:

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@scalaris needs some fresh thinking?

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I’ve been vocal on these forums and there’s plenty of examples - I’m not going to get into a rant about my thoughts this AM.