Webcontainers are now available for Safari 16.4(Desktop, iOS, and iPadOS)

If you know…you know.

It’s surely only a matter of time before locally installed IDEs go the way of the Walkman.
-Rich Harris

And boy is he right…

If this is not worthy of a shift in any roadmap I don’t know what it is.

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I am old school, with IntelliJ and VSCode right at my finger tipps.
But with FlutterFlow I started to accept that a web ide is not the worst experience. Especially when I see that the embedded editors do exact the same VScode does (surpisingly, all using Monaco)

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Not too long ago I was in the same place as you, but things are changing so fast and for the better that it’s hard not to jump on board.

I am one of the biggest advocates for Wappler in the old paradigm, but with this new dev paradigm(browser and cloud IDEs, AI, build tools) I would certainly have a difficult time selling it.

At work I was recently onboarded on a project using Svelte(kit), tailwind, vite, tRPC, and I’m out of words. I now have to split my dev time between that and Wappler and it hurts. For the first time in years it hurts.

Wappler has some catching up to do. I really do hope they already started working on Wappler X. At least on the whiteboard.

Also I hope they do some reflection and understand that they will probably need to do some sacrifices in their current user base. That is if they want to stay somehow relevant during the next years because big curves are ahead.

At this point, as a devoted user, I wouldn’t even mind if they took some seed money to develop Wappler X and eventually open sourced Wappler 5/6 so that the sacrificed user base was able to keep their projects alive.

BTW, Wappler X looks to me like a browser based IDE that provides an abstraction layer based primarily on UI controls, blocks, and components that can be used to interact with any tech you want via connectors that implement the API required by Wappler X. Mix and match backend, frontend, dev tooling, databases, etc. Everything AI assisted of course. Using webcontainers so I can build on-the-go from my ipad pro.

Wappler as a company would create connectors and maintain them for relevant and popular frameworks/libraries/tech (svelte(kit), phoenix, deno, .NET Core, Next.js, Flutter, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Elastic, AWS, Azure, GCloud, DO, Docker, k8s, vite, etc ) and the community or other companies could handle less popular stuff if there is a need/market for them(PHP, Ruby, CouchDB, oracle, Ansible, webpack, and other boring stuff). Whenever a framework/library starts to look old and unpopular Wappler would release it open source and move on to the next thing. Everything should continue working from an end-user perspective because you would just change the connector and everything should continue working.

They would keep improving the abstraction layer so it keeps up with current tech and adding more UI controls to handle it. They could even change their business model and open source the IDE and get subscriptions from the connectors. That way they could leverage the open source community help to build this non-trivial thingie.

Be it Wappler X or Bingler X, he/she who builds this wins the low/no/code game.

2 Likes

All that glisters is not gold :slight_smile:

Although container technology is great, running it emulated in the browser can be painful and slow. Well it is ok for learning exercises but not really for production. At least not yet.

Imagine running MySQL server in a container in a browser… :slight_smile:

Why would I want to run mysql inside my browser?

It’s not a secret that I have had (and still have) a hard time with Wappler (and, according to some of the posts others do). I think the weak points are settling on Bootstrap (which is no longer the cool kid on the block) and their own front end framework: it’s simply not a competition to React, Angular, Svelte or Vue.

On the other hand, the low code server connect approach is quite cool. It made me subscribing again for a API based server project which will have a web back-end and simple front-end, but is primarily used by an mobile app built with FlutterFlow (which was recommended here in the forums).

FF is fully running in the browser, inclusive the device simulator and it works well! (You can download a native app, and build locally, which I do), but you have the full dev experience in the browser (and if you integrate with Firebase or Supabase, you will just get blown away)

World is changing, No-Code and Low-Code with prompt generated building is key.
Not my cup of tea, but that’s the reality we’re facing with.

PS: as a product manager, I would split Wappler into two products, Wappler Server Connect to support low code back-end API development and Wappler App Connect, if they really want to keep their dmxConnect running, which is more or less what you proposed.

#justmy2cents

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The problem is that code+smart tooling+AI is starting to look a lot like low-code.

The fact that web containers is mentioned here is that I want to build production apps from my ipad and that is now very close to happen. If the guy that built Svelte says that local desktop IDEs are going the walkman route. I believe it’s happening.

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These guys are truly talented.

Yeah lets copy your local VS code environment in a browser tab with your settings and extensions and call it codeflow so you can review/create a PR without changing local context.

https://stackblitz.com/codeflow

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