Google App Maker

https://developers.google.com/appmaker/

by djangowithme • 9 years ago

179 80 9 years ago

developers.google.com

andy_ppp• 9 years ago

That everything will be replaced by machines including you? ;-)

brohoolio• 9 years ago

I requested access a few months ago... still don't have it.

We are looking at a number of these rapid development tools. Hopefully google opens it up soon before we select a different one.

I'd be curious if this platform has sticking power. Google rolls these sorts of offerings out from time to time and then shuts them down. If I knew there was a couple years of runway for this offering my fears would go away.

Roritharr• 9 years ago

What are the alternatives you are looking at?

2_listerine_pls• 9 years ago

Make sure you have a G-suite Business account and your domain address is whitelisted within settings.

nthcolumn• 9 years ago

I must need this since I can't even get the sign-up form to work. So do you know any others?

GarethX• 9 years ago

Here's a few: https://www.outsystems.com/ http://www.matssoft.com/ http://www.appian.com/

kuschku• 9 years ago

I just disabled JS and CSS to get the form, and changed the select’s option to value="de">Germany<, and then simply submitted it like that.

I have no idea if it worked, but at least that way it does something. Per default, the form just doesn’t do anything for me.

mmerlin• 9 years ago

http://www.alphaanywhere.com

atecarlos• 9 years ago

I would highly recommend checking out https://www.dropsource.com/

mbesto3• 9 years ago

I'm about to dig into MS Powerapps. Comes with O365. https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

jitl• 9 years ago

@dang, this title seems to be editorializing.

vnchr• 9 years ago

I thought it was framing a particular discussion, like an "Ask HN" post. Editorializing would mean asserting some sort of opinion--seems factual that this new tool has relevance to web developers.

joatmon-snoo• 9 years ago

I think it's more of the clickbait nature of the title.

dang• 9 years ago

Right. Changed from "What does Google's new tool “App Maker” mean for web developers?".

jwilliams• 9 years ago

Very interesting! This concept has been around for a long, long time in many guises - arguably recent examples are Zoho, Microsoft PowerApps, Salesforce perhaps... And many more going back to Access, Lotus Notes and dbase.

The question is really one of execution (and remaining modern). Too generic and it lacks a killer app. Too specific and it hides of a niche.

mythrwy• 9 years ago

I've not seen one of these type of applications yet that allowed the flexibility needed to handle many (perhaps the majority?) of use cases gracefully.

What I have seen is non-programmers getting enough power to get overconfident only to wind up with a mess.

These type of applications make it super easy to do 85% of the work. Unfortunately the remaining 15% often turns out to be impossible. Additionally when requirements change (and when don't they?) there often isn't the flexibility needed to make the changes.

The last thing I've observed is when something goes wrong if the person can't drill down into the internals and make adjustments they are just plain out of luck. I've seen this with both Access and Lotus Notes. Companies struggle with bugs for years. I've had a fair share of work re-writing these type of applications into web applications which finally do what is really needed without issue and can be changed when required.

In short I'm not concerned. Seen it before. Works for very simple apps, blows up spectacularly when something non-standard is needed. And this makes work for me.

Maybe this time it will be different but I really don't think so.

ruleabidinguser• 9 years ago

I get the feeling that some day theyll get it right and 90% of programming jobs will dissapear.

ja9urc311• 9 years ago

Google SharePoint?

sopooneo• 9 years ago

I've often wondered, if you could create a gui app maker like this where the app itself could be exported as, say, a Rails codebase at any time. That would help reassure organizations that wanted to use the service but were worried about lockin or the service shutting down.

headcanon• 9 years ago

It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete :) Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable.

I once worked with a guy who embodied the "grumpy old man" (we were both just out of college btw) attitude for every new, cool thing I brought to his attention. I kept telling him that in order to stay relevant as a programmer in the foreseeable future he would have to stay on top of technology and keep his chops up outside of the very mundane engineering work that we did at that company. He would flatly refuse out of hand and say things like "Someone who only knows COBOL for 40 years will still have a job". It frustrated the hell out of me at the time, but he's probably right. Not saying you're guaranteed a great job or be making google-level salaries, but you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology. There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much.

If you have even enough interest to be on this website and explore things like App Maker and question things like this, you're going to be just fine :)

themodelplumber• 9 years ago

Thank you.

I have a colleague, a graphic designer who is nearing retirement age. Every time Adobe announces a new software tool, she's partly excited, mostly terrified. Adobe likes to show how newbie-friendly these tools are. One click here, another there, and...project is done. She pays money to visit these demonstrations at conferences. Then she watches on, imagining her billable hours being redirected to an intern, the client's nephew or someone like that.

Usually the terror gets a sort of beachhead in her mind, and for a while my colleague bears the cognitive cost of this "well there's no need for me anymore" anxiety. It's really sad to watch.

There's a huge long tail of boring business coding that happens every day, and that world as an aggregate whole doesn't change very much.

This is so true. I wish everyone fearing for their career due to new tech could understand it. Braided into a broader whole of business process you've got huge loads of necessary mental capital too, like the ability to deliver on multiple deadlines, the ability to set healthy boundaries, set proper budgets, and communicate well with others. My colleague has all these things; if only she could see new technology is only a small part, and overall a very forgiving part that needs humans like her more than we might think.

ams61102• 9 years ago

I think that people in the tech world underestimate how foreign this all is to a lot of people. We've had "form builders" in various incarnations for a long long time. Most people don't have the first clue what to do with them, and don't even want to try.

fencepost• 9 years ago

Point out to her that her (and your) customers are not the people who are getting Adobe products and doing their own design work. The people who will take advantage of the new tools that freak her out are mostly people who are already doing it, they're just not doing it as well.

Her customers are the people who want someone to "make this work" and who don't want to mess with it themselves any more than they want to buy a big chest of tools and do their own vehicle maintenance.

Her customers are not the skilled amateurs now getting better tools. Her customers are the business people who already have too many things to do and aren't looking for ANOTHER project to add to their plates.

edit: minor phrasing

isaiahg• 9 years ago

I'd say COBOL is a bad example. I personally know someone hit by that so bad he became homeless and ended up spray painting street numbers on curbs for money.

gingerbread-man• 9 years ago

I've never understood how that could be possible. What makes COBOL programming so different from work in any other language as to make it impossible to pick up, say, C? I've heard numerous similar anecdotes, but never from programmers who struggled to transition from any language but COBOL. I'm sympathetic, but never having worked in COBOL myself, I can't help but be curious what makes it so distinct.

mbesto3• 9 years ago

It means we have a new prototyping tool. Cool. Don't worry, your skills aren't going to become obsolete

Not at all actually. There is a ton of demand for light code app builders (waves hand) for simple CRUD stuff in most businesses. These apps are usually cost prohibitive to build and maintain, so things App Maker make a ton of sense.

Clubber2• 9 years ago

What happens when the business outgrows what AppBuilder can do? I would assume that's a ground up rewrite. Seems like it's kicking the issue down the road and accumulating technical debt along the way.

cookiecaper3• 9 years ago

Just keep learning and building stuff, and you'll always be very employable.

This is true, but there are a few caveats.

The one that I've been running up against most recently is that a lot of this new-fangled stuff does not really have a strong value proposition, and I personally do not want to waste time on it.

This has become especially true since "cloud" hit critical mass. Junk seems to get generated 20 times faster than it used to and see much wider adoption. GitHub profiles are now status symbols and everyone feels a need to have a bundle of their own showpieces to display.

A lot of the fads are totally perplexing, from the perspective of an engineer who is more interested in building a robust system than padding his resume. JavaScript on the backend (or, even more horrifying, the desktop)? Single-page app frameworks like Angular for everything, including very simple pages? Why?

Yet, it's hard to find a web-oriented position that isn't asking for a background with some SPA and some Node.js. Maybe it's a fad, but it's still going to impact your job prospects.

The takeaway: stay on top of fads and new tech, even if you resent it and think it's really dumb.

I had the same experience with Rails; I hated so much about it and put off getting serious experience with it for 4 years or so. Turns out I still hate it after years of usage, but it was much easier to find work, both as an employee and a consultant, when I had significant experience in the fad.

Didn't matter that I was learning all kinds of new tech that I thought was interesting. As much as one may hate it, it's usually best to bite the bullet and ride the market's waves.

The most frustrating one today is Kubernetes and Docker. Ansible was so beautiful. I hate Docker with a seething passion (not necessarily other container systems), and I see Kubernetes as a very rough toolkit for people who have Google-scale problems that no one should be trying to make for themselves.

Other caveats:

* sometimes techs DO go extinct. Though COBOL is not quite extinct yet, I've known COBOL coders who have gone years unemployed (that doesn't happen to anyone who knows a language/stack still in wide circulation). A small niche has pros and cons, and one of the cons is that the supply:demand ratio is fickle, and may not always be in your favor.

* It is very rare that your technical qualifications will be so unique that they will take precedence over your personal and political qualifications. This is something most developers try to dance around, but the fact is that tech is ultimately run by people, and they want to be comfortable more than they care about that loop's runtime. If you're looking for something that will confer huge career benefits, the odds are that improving your people skills will be more valuable than improving your technical skills. This is almost universally true. It's especially true if you think it's not.

greyskull• 9 years ago

Why do you hate Rails?

Genuine question. I'm not a fan of it either, after working with it for two years, but I can't quite explain why. Maybe it's the "magic" aspect of it, since so much is convention, DSL, and hidden away.

ams61102• 9 years ago

I'm like you; I looked at Chef and thought "WTF??". I looked at Puppet and thought "WTF???". I looked at Ansible and thought "ahh, yes! they get it!"

Most of the application stacks I see that are popular I think of as being invented by people who didn't bother to look around at what had already been tried and rejected by the previous generation.

Caveat I don't build apps that need to scale to millions of users.

tannhaeuser• 9 years ago

I tend to agree that a lot of the new-fangled stuff (aka. hipster shit stacks) are generational/cyclic re-hashes of previous techniques, but unlike previous generation don't even attempt to adhere to standards or otherwise appeal to ideas such as separation of interface/implementation and interchangeability in general. Supposedly, that's pre-generation POSIX or Java-ish greybeard stuff and we're living in a post-standards era after all.

But I think you should re-consider Node.js. JavaScript is based on an ECMA-specified (ISO-adopted even) language with at least three major implementations, plus smaller (yet still highly regarded) ones. The Node.js API is (loosely) based on CommonJS which is as good as it gets in terms of a community API standard for JavaScript.

mdpopescu• 9 years ago

you have to try pretty hard to become completely irrelevant in technology

Agreed. I don't know how it is in other countries, but most currency exchange offices I have seen in Romania use FoxPro software running on an MS-DOS equivalent. I haven't used FoxPro in the last 20 years, but some people still make a living with it.

[Now that I think about it... I have actually written a small program in Visual FoxPro last year to interface with a .NET application... huh.]

zenonu• 9 years ago

From simplest to manage to most freedom:

App Maker < App Engine < Container Engine < Compute Engine (VMs)

So pick your poison for the business problem at hand. Don't host your blog on a dedicated VM. Don't use App Maker for training neural networks.

markdown• 9 years ago

I'd break App Engine into standard and flexible environments.

zitterbewegung2• 9 years ago

It means that there will be two new jobs related to this project.

1. App Maker developer wanted to create App Maker Apps .

2. Web developer needed to transition our App Maker App to a javascript / python / ruby standalone project.

zitterbewegung2• 9 years ago

Note my comment was in response to the original title : google released this what does this mean ? (paraphrasing here don't remember the exact wording).

djangowithme• 9 years ago

What does Google's "App Maker" mean for web developers?

jmknoll• 9 years ago

Very well put. Tools like this, by lowering the barrier to entry of making software (I'm assuming the best case scenario - that App Maker is a quality product), tools like this expand the pie and make the software development industry larger. Wordpress is the perfect analogy here.

And a lot of my best freelance jobs recently have been for companies not traditionally in the tech industry who had a new idea they wanted to pursue, proofed the concept with a Wordpress site, and then once they had some degree of market validation, needed a developer to build it into something more robust and customizable.

bitL• 9 years ago

Alright, so what's missing before web developers aren't needed anymore:

- speech recognition so that you tell what you want

- LEGO blocks for simple things that can be composed and adjusted by voice or AR gestures

- large amount of working code so that "glue" between blocks can be inferred using ML/DL

I am pretty sure App Maker 2.0 will have at least 1 of these finished.

cutler• 9 years ago

All hail the new Wordpress of app development.

mxuribe• 9 years ago

And I've been thinking about moving my email to fastmail...And then Google tries to tempt me with this! Dang it, they know how to lure me back! :-(

jlank2• 9 years ago

If anyone here has requested access to App Maker and not received it yet please PM me. SADA Systems (my company) is partnered with google and have been in the early access program for App Maker kicking the tires. We offer app maker development and consulting services for companies looking to deepen their investment in g suite and build cool apps on top of it!

yorwba• 9 years ago

You may want to put an email address in the about field of your HN profile, otherwise you won't be getting any PMs.

jlank2• 9 years ago

Good call, thank you!

SnowingXIV• 9 years ago

Are there limitations on data or records? I have a SQL database that I'd be interested in migrating over to a solution like this if it can handle 1M+ records without worry.

7ewis• 9 years ago

I believe there is a limit, but you can upgrade to use Cloud SQL.

tyingq5• 9 years ago

I've tried a lot of these tools. The trouble is that things go extremely well until you hit a wall. With no way to extend them with something like freeform code, the wall doesn't move.

The best ones, then, tend to be the ones that have been around long enough, or had enough foresight to have covered various corner cases.

The other issue is that most of them have "per user / per month" pricing, which doesn't work for many use cases. Things like, for example, an applicant tracking app. If you use the functionality to a high degree, every job applicant is another end user license.

Two of the better ones: http://quickbase.com & http://ragic.com

Other ones I've seen: http://caspio.com, http://knack.com, http://fusio.com, http://trackvia.com/, http://podio.com, https://www.zoho.com/creator/, http://airtable.com, https://getzenbase.com/, http://www.zenginehq.com/

One of the more promising ones was DabbleDB. Twitter acquihired them and shut the tool down. It had a very smooth UI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY

sitepodmatt2• 9 years ago

It is possible extensibility will be via Google Apps Script, about as close to "freeform" code one can get in a sandbox. Google have successfully implemented Apps Script in a number of G Suite products so I would be optimistic about seeing it in App Maker for advanced scenarios. Fingers crossed

tyingq5• 9 years ago

Many of the tools I mentioned have scripting capabilities, but that doesn't keep you from hitting a wall, because you're scripting in whatever limited context they give you.

Sometimes the wall is the data model, or the construct they give you for navigation, access control, roles, etc.

Something like freeform javascript that executes in the client would help a lot, because you could patch around limitations in many cases.

panarky• 9 years ago

Looks like App Maker already supports JavaScript for both server and client scripting, including bindings to read and write data.

https://developers.google.com/appmaker/scripting/overview

jonathanedwards2• 9 years ago

My theory is that it is not the existence of a wall that limits these tools - it is the invisibility of the wall. Spreadsheets have a wall too, but it is pretty clear to naive users where it is. These app-in-a-can tools hit the wall suddenly and unpredictably - you need a new UI feature, or the data model can't be generalized, or you can't connect to some silo. Perhaps a better metaphor than a wall would be a mine field.

tyingq5• 9 years ago

I've run into all the things you mentioned. Pretty quickly though.

One I hit in many of the tools was lack of a good UI widget for select fields that have lots of choices. Something like a combobox with autocomplete.

candiodari2• 9 years ago

These services are cloud services. They have another wall. Spiked, dark, cruel and ready to collapse on us at a second's notice. A new person getting hired at some critical services cloud company. Excellent suit. New CFO, or COO, or whatever. Nice MBA, economics degree, daddy's really important, he has been executive at some bank for decades, comes in. And something happens.

Maybe he sees pedestrian get shot on the street while he walks to his desk and smiles. Maybe a chair screeches on the floor, reminding him of the screams of some kid five years his junior he was beating up in high school. Maybe he cuts his hand on the edge of his giant mahogany desk and the drop of blood fondly makes him remember the thousands of children whose families he sucked dry, and condemned to abject poverty at his previous bank job, reveling in their inescapable fate. We will never know. An epiphany happens.

Then he proceeds to phone up some lead architect and asks the question "don't we fully control the data that these cloud 'customers' think is theirs" ? He likes the answer so much he fires the lead architect on the spot.

And his eyes twinkle.

tyingq5• 9 years ago

Replying to myself because I found an animated gif that gives a peek into some of the functionality. It does look fairly slick. https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ori...

iliketosleep• 9 years ago

I totally agree with you. Most of these tools seems really neat and have seductive examples. Then when you use it for a project you end up needing some kind of customization which they do not accommodate.

I've saved countless hours by doing as you suggested - only using the tools that have matured, where all standard questions are already answered on stackoverflow and common corner cases are covered.

So when I see Google App Maker, my response is "cool, this might be something I can use in a year or two, let's see."

ramanujank• 9 years ago

Hi - I am a Developer Evangelist at Zoho. I would love to have a chat sometime about what worked and more importantly what didn't for you guys. I really value your opinions at this time, especially since we are building some major changes into the product. Please write to me at <username> at gmail dot com if interested. Cheers!

ge96• 9 years ago

Not sure if related but right now I'd trade knowledge for business insight, I can build things but I have no idea what to make that makes money. Right now I just build stuff for people.

It's funny 3-4 years ago when I first started to learn web dev, I had a lot of ideas that I thought would be "viral/make money" but now I have hardly any... a lot of my ideas back then were pretty dumb too looking back at it.

locusm• 9 years ago

If there is one line of apps that has consistently failed over the last 20 years it is these.

Google App Maker

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