Why a 'PRO' thinks Wappler is not for real pros

Coffee Lounge
#42

I used to have a job in a web/app development company for about 4 years where I had about 5 other people working with me, I would have a responsibility to get a particular part of each project working as the client wanted, and it was quite fun, and far less pressure, with people to help when I got stuck, and s nice fixed salary at the end of each month.

When I decided to start up on my own as a freelancer I continued on this same line of thinking and mostly worked in BBEdit or Espresso as my code editor, maybe Sublime here and there, and only then I started looking into some ways of getting a more rapid development system in place. I used DMXZone for quite some years, but fairly sparingly, manually coding 90% of what I needed and then throwing in a slideshow from DMXZone. Or if I needed to create a custom CMS then I would use 90% DMXZone and 10% manual coding. It really just depended on the task at hand.

Unfortunately with things like WIX, Pinegrow, WordPress, Joomla, and many more I landed in a situation where I would go to quote on a job and my potential client would turn around and say, I want to use you but I have had 2 other quotes at half the price and a much quicker timeframe for completion.

I would take some time explaining that I was starting from a blank page and writing every line, while my competitors were probably using a WordPress template and 12 plugins and the disadvantages of this website approach. Alas as time moves on and technology alters thinking has to change with it, and I found myself relying more and more on DMXZone extensions to get tasks done faster and faster.

The result, In 2015 I started using DMXZone for as much as I possibly could, and when Wappler released I began using it entirely, I almost doubled my annual company turnover from 2015 - 2016 and from 2016 - 2018 I have almost doubled it again, while my staff compliment is still just me and one other, and I spend more time with my family than ever before. To be honest I do not feel my work quality has diminished whatsoever either. I still have 3 friends working at that same company who were on similar salary packages to me and I earn almost 3 times what they currently do, and I might actually afford to retire one day, hopefully.

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#43

First of all I want to thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Presenting all of us who use Wappler for developing as not morals and part-time guys is so very far away from the truth.

The reason for using a tool like Wappler is because people behind it do care a lot about the people who care a lot about their clients. I find this very ethical and great.

You talking about morality and that code has to be accessible (which actually is but yes I understand what you mean). Do you find it moral when you charge for a piece of code you found on StackOverflow where you just copied and pasted and altered some variables? Do you find it ethic or moral when a web dev company charges to install a WP along with a ready-made WP theme? Do you find it moral when a web dev company presents the backend of a project being made with WP etc and presenting it like it was part of the development process? Don’t know if I explain it ok but charging someone for being able to update his content through WP, I find it unethical because I didn’t do anything, I have just installed WP and all the CRUD functionalities were already there. Maybe I have created a plugin, but the plugin creation is what I am going to charge and not the entire backend system. But for some reason, most companies charge as if they have created it all and if they don’t then they charge too much for the additional work they do.

I have seen for example an expensive website made with Drupal which had to be multilanguage (about three languages). What happened is that each language for a product was actually a copy of the main language. This was causing that in the first language the product could be a flower, and if by mistake in the second language the admin was changing the product category to glass, the backend system would accept that. So in the first language, the product would be a flower and in the second a glass…

Was this the optimal solution and a professional approach? For sure no. So is it moral to deliver something because ‘this is how it works’ even if it is a source of possible errors and time wasting for the client, or to design the entire database from scratch and build a system that fits almost 100% to client needs? A solution that saves him time, and since it is based on his needs, he understands how it works in less than 5 minutes. A custom solution, which works great, that will cost him a lot less than hand coding everything and many times even less than a WP approach. Because this is what happens when you develop something with Wappler.

Of course, I understand 100% of what you trying to say and it is true that, in a dev team, Wappler looks like an alien from the outer space. In a big and complex project, where you can just come and go, the need for pure hand coding is clear. Nobody is saying, die all of you Wappler rules!

But it is true that in my almost 15years presence in web development (where I have created with PHP Nuke, Mambo, Joomla, WP, Flash, Flex builder, and hand coding) for the smallest company to others that sell all over the world, there is almost nothing that can not be made with Wappler and a taste of hand coding when needed. Actually, in Wappler, I am mostly hand coding because it is even faster than the UI. This is why, when the Wappler Dev Team was more interested in the UI part, most of us were insisting that code part is equally important. And because, them and us, we are a good team, they have listened and done exactly that.

And yes if there is a need for something so specialized I will hire another professional to do the specialized part that is needed because this is the professional approach. And if Wappler is not a good fit for the project at all I will not use it, so simple.

But being able to produce a great working result that responds to almost 100% of what client is asking in a cost lower than a solution that requires from my client to adapt on ‘how the tool works’, I find very moral, ethic and professional. And this is why I am mostly the guy who they are coming to and not leaving from.

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#44

But that is short sighted in my opinion, you’re just hoping that you and the client don’t fall out or you yoursellf are not taken seriously ill and can’t manage your clients website/s any longer for a period of undisclosed time, which is understandable if we dont think ahead and plan. Some may say I don’t care if I fall out with the client of I get ill, its the clients problem. I say its a professionals responsibility to provide their client/s with solutions which are of saleable/transportable quality, regardless of differences of opinion which could arise at any time.

Writing code by hand doesnt have to be time consumning its more about organisation as most of what we do we use again and again, with slight twists and enhancements. What it does is allow you to fine tune and tweak to your own thoughts and doesn’t limited you to what an automated process has to offer, not that I’m saying that some automation is complelety bad, especailly for those with no intention of forging a career in web-development but its also good to be in a position to break free of limitations which are on offer.

The point is I think we are all looking for points, clarification to justify why we do things and the workflows we use and the camps are mostly divided. Getting it out there provides the information where the individual can think and then choose for themselves which path to follow based on their short-term/long-term plans.

#45

Ok so you are using the view ‘If I can’t beat them I will join them’ which is fair enough and I suppose if I were in that situation I may be tempted to do the same, although I’d probably move away from web-development to be honest rather than take a route I personally was not happy with because there is little satisfaction other than the financial reward. Clients who primarily base their decison making on price alone deserve what they get as long as they know what they are getting, which probably most of the time they don’t.

#46

Went and looked at the Adobe forums, this statement seems 100% correct. I am surprised they don’t ban that guy over there. Also its now obvious this @the_coder is actually the “osgood_” character since they just signed up yesterday to comment in this thread. Plus they sound the same as what I saw over there along with the comment on Hasnode when looking, wonder how many user names that guy has here on the Wappler forums? :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

#47

I think Teodor is intelligent enough to have worked that out on his own, thank you.

I have one user name for your information. I’m attempting to keep this thread civil as it should be.

#48

@Gabriel wappler forum is free for all :slight_smile: If someone feels the need to create 5 accounts and to post using all of them - that’s fine.

I just don’t take seriously opinions of people who never used our products, i prefer to collect constructive criticism on improving our tools, from real users. That’s what actually moving Wappler forward and i can see the difference, which is in a positive direction. Not to mention the new exciting things cooking in our kitchen which are coming the next few months.

Anyway - we live in a free world, nobody is obligated to use software which doesn’t suit his needs.

2 Likes
#49

That’s my last reply here unless someone wants to abuse me and as Teodor knows I can take that all day long. I DO NOT want to bring this forum down to the level of that which the Adobe forums sometimes stoops, its not right for me to do so. Good luck Wapplers.

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#50

you’re just hoping that you and the client don’t fall out or you yoursellf are not taken seriously ill and can’t manage your clients website/s any longer for a period of undisclosed time

This is clearly an exception and you are talking like there’s no other people capable of taking the project at all if that occurs – which is another exception.

Like I said earlier, I do not disagree with you on this. As there are all kinds of contexts, the way you described would surely be the best way of doing things in a lot of situations. But there’s no unique, correct way to solve every possible problem.

What I do not agree at all is that visual solutions like Wappler “lacks the professional workflow” or the people who use it aren’t professionals. This is a value judgement. The market is extremely diverse and there are all kinds of valid and fiting solutions available for each case.

We just can not demerit one solution just because it does not fit our particular experience or notion of professionalism.

#51

Any coder can take any project made with wappler and work with it. you don’t have to use the IDE
if he know HTML and JS then its easy. (i do code in wappler when the need arise since the IDE doesn’t cover everything)
but that’s the beauty of this tool. its not a new isolated tech. its standard web. with a JS library

if everyone think like you then no new JS library will ever be used (since its not popular) and we wouldn’t see Vue.js or any new JS library.

the only thing missing is a proper documentation to app connect
and any coder could jump in if he want to.

4 Likes
#52

This I can agree with, unfortunately this has been the story of my life. I owned a photolithography company a very long time ago, a client would walk in with 4 x 5 trannies from a pro photographer, which my scanning department would oil mount onto a huge Dainappon Screen Drum Scanner that cost me in South Africa Rands 20 odd years ago R240 000 with an operator that was almost the top earner in the entire company added to that cost monthly. And they would walk out with a professional scan on a bernoulli disk.
Flatbed scanners from AGFA then hit the market and sold for about R20 000 for the scanner, and a sales pitch that anyone could do a perfect scan. I kept my high cost scanner and operator for 3 years after under the premise that my scan was still superior to the best flatbed, and it really was, but unfortunately it did not matter, I could hardly sell the scanner after 3 years and the operator was left jobless, in fact i think he went into roofing from there. I lost quite a large amount of money by sticking to my morals, and even though to this day I was right, it does not matter, I still lost money anyway.

I then paid R4 000 000 for an Avantra 44s Imagesetter to make the positives and negatives we created all day long. Within 2 years of purchase the PlateSetter was released, it was not as good, it could not do half of what my imagesetter could do, but at a cost of R6 000 000 there was no way I was ever going to afford it, I managed to sell the imagesetter a year later for a mere R720 000, and after a few more months of operation we had to cut back from 14 staff to 6, another year later we were down to 3, and before long the doors were closed and photolithography was all but dead.
I was right, I stuck to my morals, and I lost pretty much everything I had built up once again.

With web/app dev in 5 years time, with all the frameworks out there and template systems and Wappler, DMXZone, Interakt, etc. If I am still a higher cost, longer time frame, better coder, than 90% of the market I can not see my new company surviving, so yes, I am like you say joining them, my morals and my financial gain are far happier going with the flow. “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming”

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