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

Coffee Lounge
#22

At least on the front-end you’ll learn like a real developer, because you can check the HTML source at any time and Wappler’s framework is similar to AlpineJS or Vue. Routes and templates are also concepts present in other frameworks such as Laravel and AdonisJS. It also uses Bootstrap as a CSS framework, which is pretty much industry-standard for non-front-end-people (for the front-end ones, there’s Tailwind CSS which isn’t supported by Wappler)

The back-end is perhaps the less transportable skill in terms of direct “real dev tool”, but this is why courses like CS50 exist, so you can learn the regular way

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#23

Current Mindset After Deliberation.

  • Write time speed is more important than run time speed for 99% of most apps.
  • Getting something working is more important than getting something perfect.
  • Focus on the problem/solution of the domain and then, and only then, consider a tech stack. The tech is secondary.
  • Every tool that you use has trade-offs, learn to live with it.
  • Let go of wanting to know and master everything. Again circle back to whatever problem I’m trying to solve with an app and how can I go about it given my current skillset.

Thoughts on Using Wappler Going Forward

My biggest concern initially was becoming overly reliant on Wappler and being locked into a proprietary code framework, but every framework, raw code or not has some sort of lockin, in the sense that you’ll have to make the mental shift if you ever move to another language/platform. Get used to the new syntax. ect.

That includes Python/Django, PHP/Laravel, Ruby/Ruby on Rails - ect… and each of them has people that complain about certain libraries not being supported anymore ect…

Forget about the fact that there is a new Javascript framework every 12 seconds.

What excites me is the prospect of rapid app development. And at present I couldn’t find anything close to that with the amount of flexability Wappler gives.

I could go with a more traditional code framework but if I’m slower at developing apps, then there will be many times where building an app/automation just won’t even be worth it given the time necessary and the payoff to myself or a company I’m working for.

I’m confident that if I stick with Wappler that I will be able to pickup that speed.

@ben Thanks again for your thoughtful comments. One question I had for using VS code. Do you ever change/update/copy server connect/app connect code/logic in code view and when has it been useful vs using the interface?

Is there any useful resources for picking up the server connect/app connect syntax docs?

@Antony I believe you mentioned you code longer server connect in code view? How did you pick up the syntax? Is it like primarily making a certain part of the script that you’ll reuse with minor changes by coding it up in the interface and then you copy and paste it over?

@Apple You make a lot of very good points. It makes me more comfortable to invest my time into this tool.

@scalaris I apologize if I came off the wrong way. You’ve been extremely generous to this community by sharing to incredible success of your wappler project. I suppose the main thing I’d be curious to know, and forgive me if you’ve mentioned it before, but what have been the biggest challenges, frustrations of using this tool, what has been the biggest blessing? Did you consider any other tools/frameworks besides bubble before you started building?

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#24

Yes. Coming from almost 10 years of PHP/JS stack not coding the front end design and utilizing Bootstrap in wappler is much faster. . I hate laravel and wappler stopped me from starting to learn code igniter (which I may still do).

I would 100% recommend you learn a programming language and not rely on no/low code app builders to teach you, because they are limited in scope and functionality but are definitely useful. Wappler being one of the best implementations I have found. Knowing what is actually happening and learning terminology+syntax will help you better serve your clients and or purpose such as your own SaaS app.

Also, stay away from ANY low/no code solution that doesn’t allow you take your code with you or host where you want. Why I will never use bubble or softr or any solution that locks me in to perpetuity. That’s just my opinion, quite a few obviously don’t mind as bubble is very popular.

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#25

It is alright to be skeptical. If you fear this then adopt an open source low-code tool like Rintagi or REI3 or DhiWise.

There are many more alternatives but I am just suggesting these three as I am exploring them myself.

But remember one thing the moment you start using an open source solution (btw DhiWise is not fully open sourced) you have to be ready to experiment and bang you head on the wall :wink: and your experience may not be that lucid when compared to Wappler.

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#26

What is your current stack? Have you settled on something? You always seem to be chasing the next shiny thing :slight_smile:

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#27

I am sorry that you feel like that. Actually in the company where I work sticking to one single tool set is not allowed. One needs to be flexible to work in a variety of technologies.

I post various tools here on this forums not to draw developers away developers from Wappler but to make Wappler’s core team aware of various competition and thus indirectly help them decide on new features that they should include in Wappler to be successfully in the already crowded market.

For example DhiWise has support for generating complete web pages from Figma layouts. For a few moments imagine if Wappler would add support for this it would be a killer feature and probably many in the community are already asking for such a feature.

Actually we use lots of tools for building web apps right from PHPMaker and PHPRunner -to- AppSmith -to- TMS WebCore -to- Dittofi because we generally do work for other companies and build applications using the tools that our customers supply to us.

Currently we are building web apps like crazy using Dittofi. And it seems the Yankees are going crazy about Google Go and online application development tools instead of desktop development tools (thick clients as one of our customer tend to call them).

In Dittofi one developer is able to build MVPs in around 3 to 4 weeks. The longest project that I have worked on was of 12 weeks.

But when is come to my personal projects (that I take as freelancer) I prefer using a very expensive but feature rich tool called WinDev for building desktop, mobile and web apps,

For building (or customizing) ERP solutions I prefer and suggest to use opensource Frappe Framework and ERPNext.

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#28

I am a bit from the other side, have done a lot FileMaker (until version 5, but then got a bit disapointed), moved to PowerBuilder and finally made the jump to Enterprise and Mobile Java. Stuck there for decades and added PHP and later TypeScript with React and Angular to my toolbox.

With the right frameworks you can develop a native mobile app from scratch in a few days, more complex products take time. Backend and Platform/Web Projects can be quickly coded with Frameworks like Grails (Java/Groovy).

As I am no longer code for my living, I still do projects from time to time. But I look currently into Wappler as a replacement for my current toolbox for Wireframing and Prototyping. I am quite impressed how Wappler deliveres certain features, and might hang around for a while.

/heiko

#29

Hi @YogiYang, DhiWise looks really interesting. What part of it is not open sourced?

I really like that it has roles, access controls, and automatically creates APIs. It looks like it will provide the code, so I’m wondering if using it for creating the backend server and then using Wappler to create the mobile and desktop clients would work.

They even provided the code to generate everything if you want to build it into other applications. https://github.com/DhiWise/dhiwise-nodejs

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#30

I tried Dhiwise out of curiosity but was barely able to do anything, you can solely create pages by importing a design from Figma and even professionally created designs aren’t imported correctly, I couldn’t even delete anything in the design builder etc so seems like it’s just converting your figma design to an approximate react code and you’ll have to code all the rest by yourself, and correct the mistakes. So for now hand coding would be much faster if you’d go that way

#31

I’m not looking to use it for the clients/UI. I’m more interested in using it for the server.

In Wappler, I would normally build two projects. One for the server and one for the clients (mobile app and desktop app). It appears building the server app in DhiWise could be faster, then I could potentially use APIs in the clients I build in Wappler to interact with the server.

#32

Ah ok didn’t check server side, but in my opinion (don’t have much experience with server side coding) Wappler’s server side api builder is so easy to build any complex task, and basically limitless as you can create extensions so even if I’d create a front end with something else in the future, I’d build the server side API’s with Wappler

#33

You will have to ask them directly as I don’t know.

#34

Also check out Xano. It has a no-code way to create complex business logic and Endpoints/APIs. And it works independent of front end.