Not sure if I should renew Wappler Subscription

You might want to check the new Wappler Getting Started Course - it will all make sense then:

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As someone who is spending more time building mobile applications right now, for Android, I am really happy. There is a lot of configuration involved initially, yes indeed, but most of this is out of Wappler and its developers control. I’m not sure this side could ever be drag and drop? What I can be sure of is that it has been considered, probably developed internally, tested, deemed too messy or just unnecessary, and we as users don’t see it, then we get what does work, and work well, available to us in Wappler after much time and thought by all in the team… The bits outside of Wappler will always require configuration and outside dependencies. Unfortunately that is the way it is. Now as a relatively seasoned Wappler user I will say it does take a little time to get used to some idiosyncrasies when designing mobile applications, but once recognised things become a lot easier and almost seamless. Design and connect data in Wappler, Build for Android, open in Android Studio, check everything, upload to Play Store… Pretty much it. So worth sticking with it is my advice as you’ll soon get to grips with things and you will be happy you persevered as the time saved is immense!

Just my two cents…

Please stick around and always feel free to message me for any help or advice I may be able to give.

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Just to clarify here, the Getting Started course does not cover mobile, which would appear to be the OP’s biggest concern.

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Too bad someone hasn’t made a course about that… :star_struck:

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I totally understand your question, I had the same doubts as you and yet I couldn’t advise you to do anything else than hang on and stay on wappler.
Your analysis is right, the learning time is too long and too complicated. Wappler aim to be an easy developping tootl but it pays the price for its flexibility and power.
I’ve been coding small applications for professionals for thirty years now, so I can tell you that the agile method mind is not very innovative for me.
All this time I have been looking for the best languages and the best tools to do my job and satisfy my customers.
Even if I went through Fortran, Pascal, C, C++, Lisp, and later C#, I never finally made as much money as with my applications developed under Visual basic, Ms Access and Vba, Windev and of course PHP for my very first full web application in 2001.
After a break of a few years I came back to my job as a developer and I tried to get up to date by using the most twisted langages like java to the most hipe like node js, angular, vue js and I forget the others…
Each time a failure, probably i’m too old or too stupid to understand. Finally I tried Bubble, at the beginning to make a quick prototype of desktop web and mobile application for a very big French company. After a few days i’ve been able to demonstrate a live prototype and I got the contract of nearly 500K€…
Unfortunaltly i quickly met the limits of this promising tool, almost no flexibility, zero performance etc…
I resume my research for a tool adapted to my needs and this is when i met wappler.
Everything is there, speed of development, flexibility, performances, a PHP language still easy to learn and efficient, nothing is impossible, but…
But nothing is simple, there are many things possible but many things to know. Wappler is a tool for fullstack developers, it is not a toy quickly limited like bubble.
With wappler there is also this incredible reactivity of the community…solutions are always found.
But yes, you are right, the biggest problem is that there is no real pedagogical approach to help us master the tool quickly, even with the help of very nice peoples like Ben and his helpfull tutorials (Ben, without whom I would have already abandoned Wappler).
But there is so much thing to learn when you when to do web developpement.
I dream of having the time, one day (but my retirement is programmed in 10 years), to be able to contribute and make real great pedagogical tutorials to help the newcomers joinning the Wappler community.
So, please, remains persevering, trusts wappler and its growing community.

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Hi @brad I gather you must have been having a bad day, but comments like this aren’t at all helpful and from your past assistance I know you can do so much better!

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Before my morning coffee. I certainly meant no harm. Reading it back now it could have been worded better. :beers:

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Hi @abotusa I would stick with it, yes it is a very steep learning curve and yes the community can be a bit gruff or should I say “Grinchy” (Christmas pun intended), but once you do learn make yourself some notes and before you know it you will have your own documentation for your own us cases. Nothing comes easy and it can be frustrating at the start, but stick with it it will pay off in the end.

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Say no more! I know what you mean, hear you go. :coffee:

2 posts were split to a new topic: Wappler and Mobile Getting Started

Good luck finding a better and more flexible platform than Wappler. I’ve looked at dozens of them over the past 7 years because and here’s what I’ve learned:

  1. Most put you into a very severe box. Your code is on their servers (and many times your database as well.) You need to always pay for your subscription in order for your app to continue to work, sometimes you have to pay per user, sometimes you have to pay per API call.

  2. If you need to modify the source code because the ‘box’ doesn’t handle your scenario, you have to download the source code, modify it, then you either have to maintain your project using the source code (because the ‘box’ doesn’t have your updates) or you have to constantly merge the out-of-the-box update after you update it in their low-code editor (and then you have to go through the pain of learning how to deploy that package.)

  3. Wappler continues to add very complex capabilities every single week. It’s amazing the amount of functionality that they’ve added since I found them in April and every week they are releasing cool modules that make my life easier. I’ve worked in tech for over 20 years and I have NEVER seen anything like it.

  4. Most low-code options don’t support multiple environments. I can 1-click deploy to any number of servers that I set up.

  5. Wappler is the best combination of low code + development IDE. All the flexibility of a true development IDE with all the speed advantages of low code. I click ‘add a step’ to an API and in 1 step Wappler has dozens of lines of code that they created. If I need a custom api, now they support it.

  6. Many low-code options don’t have GitHub support, so if you need to grow your team, only 1 person can work in the project at one time.

  7. I’m not spending hundreds of hours looking for the mis-matched curly brace on my project which happened to me regularly in other frameworks like Angular and React. (I do occasionally have this error, but not nearly as much as in those monstrous coding languages.)

To your point, there is a learning curve. You do kind of need to know how to code (or be able to search for code samples and plugin and play) to be successful. However, all of the flexibility and speed of development is worth it once you get past the learning curve.

For mobile apps specifically there are a bunch of hoops to jump through to learn regardless of your solution (i.e. how to use Cordova to get access to device capabilities, how to generate your IOS/Android keys, how to send push notifications.)

I haven’t used Wappler to create a mobile app yet (the apps I have been building have been web-based), but I have created mobile apps using other low-code tools and they ALL have this learning curve. I had to learn Jquery and Cordova to use Appery. I had to learn angular to use Ionic Creator. Good Barber was so constrained that I couldn’t even use it (it’s a decent solution if you are creating an app for a conference, or have a content-based app where they are the CMS, but if you need anything beyond that, the capabilities were limited.) AppGeyser just was clunky and hard to use. Thunkable was weird and also super-constrained. I looked at Flutter briefly but it requires too much code to use. I can’t even remember the names of the other pieces of crap I looked at, but there was a LOT.

For me, Wappler is perfect because their solution works 90% of the time out of the box (create an API, it’s done in 10 clicks, create a database table in a few clicks), and when I need to do something out of the box, I can add my custom code to support it. The support has been completely amazing and almost every time I’ve either found the answer to my question by searching on the community site or someone has answered my question in the forum.

The other unfortunate thing that has happened in this industry is that companies like SalesForce and Zoho are now calling themselves ‘low code app builders’ when they aren’t. These aren’t apps, they are custom forms with some custom workflow hosted on their servers. So, you’ll actually have a hard time finding true app building solutions because the SEO on this category is messed up and all the skyscraper articles (i.e. “Here’s the top 100 app builder solutions for 2020”) have these pieces of crap on it.

It took me years to find Wappler. Every time I ran across a low-code app builder, I’d check it out and they all had a large list of cons and constraints.

I don’t know what kind of app you are building. The only time that I wouldn’t recommend Wappler is when you need true native capabilities that Cordova doesn’t support as well as the native libraries (which in that case you are stuck building a native IOS/Android app - you won’t be able to use a low-code framework for that.)

For example:

  • If you want to build an apple watch app that reads heart rate info
  • If you have heavy video requirements or need graphic editing capabilities that aren’t supported well in Cordova
  • You are creating a game (and in that case there are other things you have to learn to do that)

Sorry for the long post but I love Wappler and have spent years trying to find something as good as it. I literally tell my husband every day how much I love Wappler. I think he’s getting jealous. :grinning:

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Thank you @crystaltaggart, for me that is definitely the most helpful and informative post about Wappler I have EVER read.

It is one thing to use Wappler and love the good parts and be frustrated by the challenges.

But most of us have not been on the journey you have, and to hear why you love Wappler SOOOO much makes any remaining challenges gently melt away!

These responses are excellent. I spent a good few months getting frustrated and not doing much with Wappler until I decided to go for it and builda particular project with Wappler and that got me to the stage where I’m completely comfortable with it.

To give a quick example, I built a complete system for handling football pitch bookings, alerting registered players about future games, they log in and mark themselves as playing or not and pay via PayPal and I’ve literally spent less than 6 hours on that complete system. I’m fine tuning it but it’s fully functional and that even includes an admin area for me to manage the data. And it’s incredibly slick to run using all the ajax tricks.

Wappler has enabled me to take on very large projects knowing I can build them in a fraction of the time, and with flawless code so it’s very reliable and secure.

So, I’d say stick with it and start a real-life project and work at it as hard as you can and it will begin to become second nature in how it works.

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I totally understand your dilemma. I have be an on and off again wappler pro subscriber myself for the past two years and I couldn’t agree more. Now my experience with wappler has been great, php and nodejs integrations for web, to me at least, work fine and certainly make creating scrud applications an ease. This is coming for someone who came from design and certainly not a web developer per se, granted when I has school everyone was learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript back then and to this day I am still learning and a fan of JavaScript, VueJS, nodeJS and the JAMstack. But Wappler again has been great, for example, I mostly use wappler for prototyping and the last thing I built on wappler was a scrud prototype with a backend for a simple tracking app using the nodejs version of wappler, and it was really easy.
https://ifi-tracker.vurself.com/
Search IFI-123 returns a case number

However, the mobile side of wappler is another side of the story. I agree there is less documentation, and even when you search the community forum for a similar problem, you might find there are a few posts here and there that talk (barely) about restricting parts of your mobile app and connecting your server connection actions from your web app for example. There are a quite a few other things to figure out including the environment setup up. Most of the time it works, other times not so much.

But in defense of wappler, I think it is possible to build mobile apps.

It’s just that, and this is speaking of personal experience, a certain level of knowledge might be expected right of the bat. Again this is my personal experience and opinion, surely there is a learning curve, but sometimes I wonder, if I was just designing websites with wappler and I didn’t know HTML, or CSS or Bootstrap or jQuery, will the learning curve be higher or lower? and the conclusion I always come to is that knowing at least some of the mentioned above will make the learning curve lower. This is also the case for creating scrud apps in wappler, will the learning curve be higher or lower if I came in already knowing about some form of (php/nodejs) backend workflow development, among other things like includes, partials, database connections, relationships, loops, conditionals, front end frameworks etc? My conclusion is again that the learning curve will be way lower. Same thing with app development on wappler, I think you can build simple mobile apps, but for more advanced features you might need some background knowledge to begin with especially about best practices for mobile app development and the frameworks that are used. But, you know, some say (pwa) web apps are the future of app development (to some extent) and wappler can do those.

Best of luck.

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Hello,

If you have used WinDev for Web or WebDev then you may know that WB has PHP mode and it is easy to learn and use. But this tools very very costly!

I am currently checking in PhpRunner. It has a very obscure UI but it very flexible and usable. I just created a backend Admin panel for a client in just 3 working days. That is pretty fast for me! Personally I like its Visual Editor and Reporting tools.

If you have been a VB guy then I would urge you to have a look at b4X.com.

TIA

had a look…sorry, wappler is definitly the best choice…but considering “my” needs.
I’m also working with b4x, but only for the mobile client part of my web application. Working offline is mandatory.
Currently, i did not take time to evaluate wappler Framework 7…because of the lack of tutorials…

Getting concerned by that, what do you mean?
I’m about to get my pro wappler account for building a platform that will enable one on one video chat between a user and a consultant. Would that be possible (with Zoom APIs or the likes)?

I believe the Zoom APIs would work (I haven’t looked at them in a while to see the capabilities). My guess is that you would dynamically create a zoom meeting via the API, then open the app which should work. I’m not sure if they have embed capabilities but if they do for HTML/Javascript that. would work too.

My point was really if you were trying to record videos from an app the cordova libraries for video just pretty much suck. You have to do native.

In my experience I would advise you to check out: https://www.agora.io/en/

It is better and has many more features compared to Zoom.

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Thanks, I checked it out and it is indeed great. I’ll use it with Wappler.
FYI, I stumbled upon https://whereby.com/ too while researching this subject. But Agora seems superior to many extents.