Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycode-build-web-mobile-apps-without-writing-code/

by bscanlan • 6 years ago

603 319 6 years ago

aws.amazon.com

jeffbarr2• 6 years ago

More info at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycod...

Cilvic• 6 years ago

This should be the real post link IMHO

dang• 6 years ago

Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.honeycode.aws/.

avolcano• 6 years ago

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the space.

On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first.

edit: actually going to pull back slightly on this comparison, since apparently Honeycomb is a little closer to something like Access, where there is a database _in_ the app, whereas Retool is built around connecting to an external data source (e.g. a SQL database). This surprised me because I assumed the entire reason you'd want an AWS version of this kind of tool is to integrate with the broader AWS ecosystem, like frictionless hookup to a DynamoDB or whatever. It may have this but just not spotlight it on the marketing pages?

brd529• 6 years ago

My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.

darepublic2• 6 years ago

Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.

basch5• 6 years ago

It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players.

Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems.

This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings.

It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor.

https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-...

https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof...

[1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.

tyhoff• 6 years ago

I find it most similar to bubble.io, which includes databases but also allows linking to external data sources like Airtable.

dvdhsu• 6 years ago

Hi there! Founder of Retool (https://retool.com) here (and long-time HN reader). Agreed that Honeycode is adjacent to us. I think an interesting way of viewing the space [1] is who the product is for. There are lots of drag and drop app-builders (e.g. mendix, outsystems, bubble, msft powerapps, amazon honeycode, etc.), but they're all built for non-technical people. Their goal is to make programming more accessible to all. (Which I think is a very noble and very interesting goal!)

Our bet, however, is that code is here to stay, since code is actually a pretty efficient way of getting a computer to do something [2]. With that said, though, building specific types of apps (in our case, internal front-end apps today) is surprisingly difficult (have you tried recently!? you have to use react, redux, install 10+ npm modules, etc... just to make a front-end that has a table + POSTs back to your internal API!).

And so that's why we're building Retool for engineers, which has resulted in a few interesting decisions:

* we are not a system of record, since engineers don't like to move data around. We'll connect to your data, no matter where it is (e.g. postgres, a custom API, salesforce, etc.).

* we rely on the user knowing how to write code. I think this is interesting because low-code is good for getting to 50%, 60%, etc. But as you try to get closer and closer to 100%, it becomes harder and harder, since full customizability within a GUI (without code) is just hard (cf 2.). Retool lets you get to 60 - 70% of what you want very quickly, but then relies on you finishing the last ~30% with code, if you really want to. (We provide APIs, let you import custom React components, let you write JS anywhere [3] within {{ }}.

this also has led us to embracing git syncing (serializing retool apps as yaml files and syncing them to git repos: https://docs.retool.com/docs/git-syncing ), being on-prem by default (https://docs.retool.com/docs/setup-instructions), etc.

(If anybody is interested in working on this, please email me at david AT retool DOT com. I think there's really a small chance we can really change how business apps are built.)

1. Funnily enough, when we started Retool, there was no low-code / no-code space. If you look at our original Show HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17725966), you'll see that nobody mentions "no code", "low code", or anything siilar. It's certainly been fun to watch a "trend" pick up around us, haha.

2. For example, imagine a switch statement. Very simple and concise in most languages, but incredibly hard to implement in a GUI. (A graph with nodes and edges, perhaps?)

3. We secure it by running all JS in a sandboxed iframe.

wackget• 6 years ago

you have to use react, redux, install 10+ npm modules, etc... just to make a POST request back to your internal API!).

Or just use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript?

eb0la• 6 years ago

I guess RAD tools (now no-code) will never fade away from the market.

I bet you're getting a lot of traction on corporations that need to upgrade/replace internal tools.

I know, internal tools will always suck because:

1) your market changes faster than you can change your apps, so you're always lagging behind.

2) And technology moves faster than you can keep them to date. That's the reason we still have IE as corporate browser in most enterprises.

Also, 3) nowadays it's very hard to do both good frontend AND backend coding. Technologies diverged a lot since, say, Rails 2.0 (which is just 8 years away from now). And the barrier to compete is higher every day.

sutterbomb• 6 years ago

I'm curious if you see 3rd party vendors being useful in this space. e.g. one person consultancy that can use Retool to quickly build out internal apps for other orgs that aren't able to get any internal dev resources

txcwpalpha3• 6 years ago

On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first.

I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so, so much and It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use.

But actually, I'm messing around with Honeycode right now and although I haven't gotten a chance to really dig deep and test the long-term usability of it, I have to say that so far it is gorgeous and intuitive. If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.

outworlder3• 6 years ago

It blows my mind that such a large company can't seem to even get on the same page about what color scheme or menu bar position they want to use.

Isn't it the other way around? Being a large company makes coordinating on an uniform look and feel much harder, not easier.

jv22222• 6 years ago

OMG The Mechanical Turk editor is soooo bad.

ihumanable• 6 years ago

Can someone smarter than me explain why the AWS UI is so off-putting? I also find myself just put off by AWS UIs.

I can't even figure out why I hate it so much. Looking at the screenshots though immediately filled me with the sense that this thing would just be awful to use. When I go back to the screenshots to try to find objective things I dislike about the UI, I can't really find anything. It seems to do the stuff a UI needs to do.

Maybe it's just a negative association with the look & feel of AWS UI, because most of the time when I'm interacting with AWS I'm trying to get a service I haven't used before up and running. Going back and forth between dense documentation and the UI, clicking and failing, and staring at a spinner spin for far too long.

Perhaps all those hours spent fighting with other pages that look so similar to this one has given me a subconscious dislike for all AWS UIs.

donavanm• 6 years ago

If the UI team that worked on this just completely took over the AWS console, I wouldn't complain.

This is the fundamental misunderstanding. There is a centralized AWS console team/organization. They are responsible for the UI libraries, guidelines, common elements, mezzanine, etc, across all of AWS.

They dont write the actual "service pane" UX that you interact with when you start an EC2 instance or upload an S3 object. That surface area is so large, varied, and changes at a frantic velocity that there's no way a single team or group could ever keep up. Even a single "service" like EC2 or Systems Manager actually has multiple front end teams responsible for different portions of the UX or functionality.

Aeolun5• 6 years ago

I agree so much with this. I hate the AWS console UI so much

Oh, I love, hate, detest, adore, or any number of other negative and positive adjectives the AWS console UI, all depending on what page I visit.

mNovak• 6 years ago

As far as I can tell, this is being pitched to teams, not really general purpose applications (as I imagine a highly scalable DB being used for). The pricing is quite high on a per user basis and the 'tables' max out at 100k rows, so not useful for any larger scale data aggregation.

Agreed, a seemingly missing feature is how can lambdas or other AWS ecosystem components interact with this data? I could imagine systems where it's nice for "no-code" and "code" to interact cleanly.

mg794613• 6 years ago

Ok honestly, my first thought was "here we go again", BUT when you look at the @jeffbar provided, you can see, that yes, it is "visual" programming. It does however require a certain logical fluency. So I was wrong: It is _not_ the sales/ceo dream of no longer having pesky engineers. It's a proper gateway drug into programming.

k__• 6 years ago

So, it's more than retool?

jnwatson• 6 years ago

The most common fallacy across almost 40 years of visual programming attempts is that one can somehow escape the essential complexity of a problem domain. One must have "a certain logical fluency" to design essentially any process, regardless of the technology used.

jonny_eh• 6 years ago

Right, even extreme Excel macros require logic, and is also a programming gateway. The nice thing about Excel (or the article's example of Visicalc) is that one doesn't need to jump into the deep end of logic problem solving, at least at first.

trixie_• 6 years ago

I'm pretty sure the zillions of Excel users proves it's not logic that's the problem It's all the scaffolding around it that is the real barrier of entry to most development systems.

MangoCoffee2• 6 years ago

Visual Basic?

grouseway• 6 years ago

Is this the first instance of Amazon offering an end-user (i.e. non developer) SaaS style product?

rgj• 6 years ago

No, there is the Amazon Connect cloud contact center https://aws.amazon.com/connect/

rpadovani• 6 years ago

I think Connect qualify as well: while you can create powerful flows integrating it with Lambda, basic flows are super easy to setup through the UI, just clicking around.

https://aws.amazon.com/connect/

cj• 6 years ago

Below are a few other AWS services that I'd consider "SaaS style". Lightsail is the only one that has a similar SaaS style pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/

- Lightsail (ie. self-hosted wordpress)

- Cloud9 (IDE in the cloud)

- Workspaces (remote windows/linux desktops)

- Workdocs (cloud documents)

- Workmail (email)

- Chime (audio / video calling)

deanCommie• 6 years ago

I'm always wary of these kinds of ideas, but honestly this looks pretty cool! I feel like the Press Release[1] actually quantifies why companies would want to use really well.

[1] https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

alexashka2• 6 years ago

This is like a movie you know 2 minutes in, is going to be a complete disaster, give it another 5 minutes and finally turn it off. You stumble upon it's imbd page some time later to discover it has a 3/10 rating and nobody went to see it.

I don't see a single innovative idea in this product and I see plenty that's worse than the experience I had in Dreamweaver in year 2000.

justaguyhere2• 6 years ago

This looks similar to Airtable, except Airtable UI seems nicer. Airtable is a Billion dollar company, tons of people are happily using it.

I am no fan of Amazon, but I do not think it is as bad as you describe. Even if it is half as good as Airtable, this will take off, simply because of Amazon's weight behind it.

careyrouse3• 6 years ago

I agree, the users of Airtable love the UI. But it's mostly individuals and small companies. Airtable isn't practical for enterprises with its 50k row limit and extremely limited permissions.

With Honeycode being an Amazon tool, I would expect their targets are more enterprise. But even this tool is limited to 100k rows, so until that changes, this can't really be used at scale either.

There's still a gap in modern database apps combining scale, granular permissions and something made for non-technical users.

ako3• 6 years ago

It doesn't have to be innovative, it needs to be useful. Having this inside the aws ecosystem, is going to be very useful for a lot of people.

alexashka2• 6 years ago

It's about as useful as amazon web services are, for 90% of the companies that are going to get rid of their infrastructure and become completely dependent on amazon for their business to continue functioning.

These little creepy 'useful' products are just vendor lock-in, the same way those creepy Internet Explorer-only features were 'useful', and forced the whole goddamn web development industry to complicate their tooling and made testing and providing the same experience across browsers a goddamn nightmare for decades (is it still ongoing? I thankfully escaped hell that is modern web development).

I'll probably be on my deathbed by the time these old idiot governments comprehend what these creepy IT companies have been up to since their inception.

amrrs• 6 years ago

It looks like an Airtable replica to me. I might be wrong. But anyways, AWS getting into no-code (less-code) space is definitely going to impact a lot of small time players. AWS can complete the loop of development to Custom Deployment and It also has bunch of other things in its offerings that anyone would be happy to jump in. I'm just worried about how small-time No-Code players would survive going forward!

themodelplumber3• 6 years ago

I'm exploring no-code solutions for some small business tasks. In my experience, if I can find a non-enterprise company to fill my needs, I will be way better off. My past experience with Amazon tools is that they happily stand in the enterprise solutions space, with an unfortunate amount of the baggage that brings along.

pldr12342• 6 years ago

Agreed. At least, I don't see anything (other than visual complexity in their UI/UX) that sets them above Airtable.

Good try though.

odiroot• 6 years ago

My first impression it's like SaaS version of Microsoft Access GUI "apps" (or better said, semi-smart data entry forms).

riskable• 6 years ago

It's responsive layout Hypercard. We've come full circle.

Maybe more like Filemaker Pro, circa 1990.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 6 years ago

I think you are right. You show some of my coworkers GUI built with Qt and they will eww all over it.

edit: But this.. it is polished.

t0mas88• 6 years ago

I'm very eager to see the Office 365 answer to this.

Microsoft is the one that needs to come up with a defensive play here, because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large. I'm guessing Microsoft could do a better job than AWS integrating this with Excel and the Office 365 or MS Teams kind of UI to make it feel at home to their users.

On the other hand, AWS is ahead now and likely to start integrating this with the rest of their services if it takes off.

Either way, I think this can be an interesting development for a lot of half baked Excel processes that are everywhere in a typical company.

topkai22• 6 years ago

Power Apps is Microsoft's version of this. It is actually quite popular.

justaguyhere2• 6 years ago

Microsoft can do a much better job than Amazon if they created a competing product. They might take the quicker route and buy AirTable maybe?

I can foresee Microsoft and other bigger players entering the no code market seriously in the near future (though one can say Microsoft already has power apps etc).

kmnc3• 6 years ago

Didn't Microsoft just release their Airtable competitor? Lists? Did everyone already forget about that? Seems pretty comparable to this Amazon offering other then the mobile UI WYSIWYG builder.

They don't push it as an "app builder" though, more of a web based access that is heavily tied to office/teams.

tda• 6 years ago

It's called Power Apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/

basch5• 6 years ago

The "Power Family" or Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents) are inarguable the most mature bundle of WYSIWYG, visual data flows, and data graphing on the market. It's not just about the app building itself, but all the ways to get data in and out of it, and what else you can do with the data once youve gathered it. Salesforce is probably the other company in the same league.

Microsoft clearly has a branding / marketing problem, where people have ignored them for too long, and or are just reconsidering products Microsoft has had on the market for 10 year (another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.)

Mirosoft Lists (their Airtable) is a new interface over SharePoint lists. SharePoint lists are one of the data sources for the Power Platform, but so is Dynamics CRM, ERP etc.

https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/

mango_indian2• 6 years ago

Powerapps I think still charges per user login, That is where I think Honeycomb wins, I expect Powerapps, and google appsheet to drop charges soon.

syshum2• 6 years ago

>because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large

Those people are not going to be giving up Excel for this. I have tried for years to get people to use other better tools than excel, it is a non-starter

Power Excel Users will not stop using Excel for either PowerApps or this AWS Product

kmnc3• 6 years ago

Yep, getting people off Excel for fully packaged software is hard enough.

Edmond• 6 years ago

As someone working in this space (codesolvent.com)...color me unimpressed so far.

Of course with AWS resources this can change with time. They did hype this some months back, I was expecting something a bit more impressive OOTB.

fomojola2• 6 years ago

As an aside: I've been reading the AWS blog posts from Jeff Barr, but ignoring the Amazon Polly audio conversions. I actually listened to it today, and not only is it not terrible, but there's a moment (around 1:05 in or so) where you can actually hear an inhalation! I know @jeffbarr is sometimes in these threads: is that a standard feature of AWS Polly, or is there some preprocessing that is generating SSML to control cadence, and if so how do we get our hands on THAT?

NathanKP• 6 years ago

Breathing is a feature that you can turn on in Amazon Polly since 2018. There are automated, manual, and mixed modes depending on how much you want to manually control the breaths. More info here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-po...

jeffbarr2• 6 years ago

Thanks for listening to Polly! That's Polly's Matthew voice, there's not special preprocessing, and you can make your own text sound like that.

tlrobinson• 6 years ago

It still sounds very robotic to me. I think Google's WaveNet sounds much more natural: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2

fomojola2• 6 years ago

There's a personal taste element: I agree with you that certain WaveNet voices sound better (I've actually used them for video narration with some success). The breathing caught me off guard: it took me a minute to identify THAT as the element that was there but I implicitly wasn't expecting to hear.

The breathing + pausing at commas/full stops and general cadence was frankly superior to what I've seen with Google Cloud Voice, which is why I was curious if preprocessing was done. I've generally had to do multiple manual passes with Google Cloud Voice to get audio output that didn't sound robotic.

IdiocyInAction• 6 years ago

Is this really no code? Those formulas they are using look quite a bit like code to me and GUI builders and templates are also nothing new.

andreshb• 6 years ago

Google would be smart to acquire Glide (https://www.glideapps.com/)

dataminded3• 6 years ago

And turn it off 3 months later? :-)

spderosso• 6 years ago

Google acquired AppSheet earlier this year. AppSheet has been around for longer than Glide and it has more clients and features. They already acquired the leader in building apps from spreadsheets.

dvdsgl• 6 years ago

Founder of Glide here! Thank you for the vote of confidence :)

We’re quite excited to see the no-code space heat up with Amazon joining the fray.

ZeroCool2u• 6 years ago

This looks very Tableau-esque. Another tool that takes a similar amount of work to learn compared to just learning programming in the first place, but with more vendor lock-in.

themodelplumber3• 6 years ago

Maybe it also serves as a ramp up to learning programming, but along that ramp you can deliver economic value to your audience, rather than completing CS theory exercises. That's often one of the selling points of this kind of product.

odshoifsdhfs4• 6 years ago

I am working on a product in this space.

I think pretty much all the 'no code' apps that are coming out have taken the wrong approach to it. No matter what, they are still 'designed' by programmers with a programming mentality. This will lead to a sort of failure as people will feel limited when using it, and a 'non programmer' mentality looks at this and goes wtf?

For example:

=Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes")

I can understand this, 80% of folks here also, but do your mother or father? Or the small business owner down the street? Why is the word `Tasks` in 3 places? What is the "Yes", and so on and on

themodelplumber3• 6 years ago

I like what you're saying. Would just add that if my mother and father are the audience, I fear your solution would be unfairly docked a couple stars just for existing online and in software form. They would much prefer that any app exist as the result of a 10-minute phone call. ;-)

odshoifsdhfs4• 6 years ago

Care to explain? I didn't fully understand.

You mean they prefer to call someone for 10 minutes and pay them to build the app? Or a recommendation to use an existing app?

VRay• 6 years ago

Yeah, man, this looks like a beefed-up version of Excel macros

Anyone who can write working spreadsheet macros could probably just learn to actually program. Maybe they aren't going to be making the next RTX Voice or proving P=NP, but I'll bet they could crank out some CRUD

odshoifsdhfs4• 6 years ago

I did a lot of customer interviews. And I mean a lot.

People that are good at using Excel (as in, not just create a table with data, but know how to use it, do macros, pivots, etc), if the need arrives they just move up the chain to Access/Filemaker. I would say Excel is their gateway drug to coding. Maybe now they will move to Honeycode perhaps (if the UI is ok)

The ones that can't use Excel past putting =A1+A2*0.2 can't use most of the no code tools. But they can use a more visual approach to programming. This is the market I believe will/is exploding as more and more, pretty much everything requires a computer/app, but the customisation for each specific case isn't there. They require a more Lego like approach to 'software' development. For me, that is the NO-CODE definition.

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

Deploying the CRUD securely is a problem, though. Things like this and AirTable are entirely managed by their developers and your IT department, and Excel sheets can just be dropped into an email. If I write a cool python script, how is the rest of my team supposed to use it if none of us are developers and haven’t done it before, and with IT probably trying to stop me?

arkitaip2• 6 years ago

There are much powerful && easier to use no-code/low-code products on the market but sooner or later, you will need to code and work with databases. Even Bubble becomes complex once you move beyond the most basic use cases.

paxys• 6 years ago

There is a very large target audience which is technical enough to write Excel formulas but not enough to build an app. Your mother or father will never need to use this tool as it is, but those people will.

kmnc3• 6 years ago

Wait, who are these people? WYSIWYG App builders have existed for decades and Excel still dominates. Maybe you don't agree, but the main reason for this in my opinion is because these app builders are way too complicated and learning them is largely pointless since their use cases are generally super trivial. Why build an app if Excel+Email works?

Further, if these things do start taking off I don't think the people using them will be non technical people, it will just be technical people shifting their job description.

It is like an all in one hammer, the craftsman throws it in the garbage, and the non craftsman has no idea what to do with it.

cosmodisk2• 6 years ago

Well, having seen enough people who will never ever in their lives be able to understand this: =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes"

And I'm 100% sure that no company would let them anywhere near that kind of stuff,even if it's vanilla drag and drop. Those people are good at some jobs and task but definitely not at this. Anything designed for purely non technical people usually is just a bit crappy: I taught myself programming so I won't need to deal with Salesforce Flow...

deegles• 6 years ago

A requirements-writing assistant would be killer. Maybe something that uses natural language and writes a spec in a formal language under the hood.

wccrawford• 6 years ago

IMO, that example is absolutely not "no code". In fact, I would think it would be very hard to understand by non-coders. If you can train someone to understand that, you could train them to code.

The only saving grace it has is that most of the interface is "no code" so that you can focus your training on smaller pieces... But that's just "low code" at that point, which isn't nearly as marketable.

kords• 6 years ago

A lot of these things can be done with SharePoint. Same thing, no code.

llimos• 6 years ago

Correct, especially when you add Power Automate and Power Apps - MS have been quietly pulling ahead in this space.

They also have one huge advantage that no-one else besides maybe Google have - integration with Office 365: your corporate directory, email, filestore... Which means they don't even need to be the best at this kind of product. Good enough, plus the integration, is a game changer.

basch5• 6 years ago

Office 365 AND Dynamics (CRM, Finance, ERP etc.)

The one thing Microsoft really needs still is in house, industry specific layers to drop on top of dynamics, such as https://www.mtwocloud.com/ instead of depending on these third parties. Microsofts own sales teams don't know these products exist, and they have poor visibility. Enough companies won't even touch Dynamics, preferring something more industry specific.

Look at all the other things they cover in the SalesForce, Adobe, Oracle realm that automatically integrate right into the Power Platform. https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/

draugadrotten• 6 years ago

SharePoint

Sharepoint in real life seems to be a very complex product with few people actually knowing it. Out of a company of 10,000 people we probably have 5 guys actually knows anything about sharepoint, Why is it so obscure?

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

Because its so hard to use that nobody can really explain it. Is it a share drive in the cloud? Not really, but it can kind of do that. Is it an application platform like Salesforce? Kind of. Is it a project management system? It sure can be.

On top of the confusion, often times the only time a end user sees the word "SharePoint" is when their Office document got lost because OneDrive pooped out and it's SharePoint underneath, so then it starts whining. The only time I've seen SharePoint work well at all is at a company that kept teams of SharePoint developers on staff, and even then we still begged for a share drive somewhere (have you ever tried to store keepass vaults in SharePoint? it's a magical experience).

ixtli• 6 years ago

I focused a bit on the history of computing when i was getting my CS degree and one of the things I've found super interesting is that for at least forty years (perhaps longer!) we've been at least academically interested in writing code "without writing code". It never really works, however for a technical person it can be a great way to do, like, a sketch.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=without+writing+code is an interesting search

lucasverra• 6 years ago

im genuinely asking myself if "this time is different".

The merging of Cloud + Software consumerism of 15 (ish) years of mobile + software eats world can make the Bubbles, Airtable and other no/low code tools the next long tail revolution of software ?

What is different from the front page + Dreamweaver + flash days ?

My hint : cloud computing and the hosting of database AND logic in bigcorp maintained garden

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what your point is. When you say "bubbles" and "software eats the world" I think you are saying that these tools were supposed to replace programming, but so far they haven't.

In fact I think that people who make that claim are wrong. Low code development tools have become hysterically successful, especially in recent years. WordPress (400+ million websites) has 50000+ plugins that can do almost anything. Look at Salesforce (17 billion revenue) and PeopleSoft. Airtable (1.1 billion valuation). Shopify is approaching 1 million sites. Wix has $600 million in revenue. There are a lot of other massively successful products that fit into the loose association you gave.

arkitaip2• 6 years ago

It's weird that Amazon releases this low-code tool and yet they can't offer basic managed CMS/Wordpress to millions of businesses out there. Their pricing could start at 20 USD per month and they could conquer the premium (wordpress) hosting market dominated by WP Engine, Kinsta, Media Temple, etc.

syshum2• 6 years ago

So far I have yet to see a real practical use for no code, they all seem great in the demo's and get alot of hype but at the end of the day they take far more resources to maintain than a normal app and you end up having to have a programmer maintain after the end user quickly exceeds their ability to develop anything in a no code enviroment.

They either get Flustered and end up back in Excel, or the "app" gets handed off to IT / Development who get frustrated and start a project to rewrite in a actual programming environment

martythemaniak• 6 years ago

Funny tangent: I spent my internship (16 months between 3rd and 4th years) building Web 2.0 apps that were essentially implementing flows people were using on top of Word/Excel+Email. It was good work and people were happy to have a nice dedicated web app instead of their clunky flows.

After about a year I noticed I was basically doing the same thing over and over again, so I decided to make an app that makes web apps! I could build any app in my app! Awesome! I spent 4th year building this awesome tool out - there was a document editor to create your forms, there was a Visio-like flow editor that could make decisions, take actions (email to that person, fill in that field, send to branch 2 if that checkbox was checked etc). After a few months I eagerly applied to YC (for summer 2007) and... nothing. Turns out I couldn't actually describe wtf I was doing and pg would rather fund Heroku. Good call!

Anyway, there were other similar companies back then (Coghead) that went nowhere, but this concept keep on popping up and AirTable seems to have caught on. I guess someone at Amazon got tired of writing the same apps over and over again.

cosmotic• 6 years ago

Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?

pmlnr• 6 years ago

Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple.

frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience.

They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.

PaulWaldman• 6 years ago

Ladder Logic is still used heavily in modern industrial automation systems. This isn't to ease development, but to aid in the supportability by folks who don't have a background in software and are used to reading electrical prints.

outworlder3• 6 years ago

Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone?

Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is.

Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.

jrockway• 6 years ago

It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.)

Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.

analog313• 6 years ago

I believe the answer is yes: Excel. Even without using macros, it's basically dataflow programming and a built in user interface structure.

People solve problems and build useful tools using Excel, even those who have no realistic expectation of ever learning to write code. In fact it may be the most widespread programming tool.

Are there things it can't do, and problems with scalability and collaborative development? Sure. But BASIC had those problems and nobody says it isn't programming.

I've seen master programmers use Excel, when they wanted to do something with mixed-type tabular data and graphs, that they could share for others to use.

For a lot of people, hacking a spreadsheet together is easier than trying to communicate their needs to a programmer.

chrisvalleybay• 6 years ago

My guess is they are doing that because one of AWSs biggest competitors will be Azure. The Enterprise will be riding on Azure+Power Apps with data sourced from Dynamics et. al.

ilaksh2• 6 years ago

Its weird to me that people in here keep saying this looks like a competitor to [a single specific recent product X] when in fact this type of system has been an entire very popular product category for decades, and there are literally thousands of systems like it. Of course not all of those thousands of systems have become extremely popular or have the same scope or are contemporary.

For example: Access, Salesforce, WordPress, Tableau, 10000 other ones that never became really popular including the simple one I made ten years ago for a client.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platfor...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programmin...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_developmen...

annoyingnoob• 6 years ago

This looks like several Microsoft products stacked together, Sharepoint, Forms, Flow, Power Apps. I already do this with Microsoft and most of the time I don't have all of the tools I need or I want to scream at the screen "just show me the code!".

throwawaysea• 6 years ago

Things are broken when a well resourced large company can just steal someone else's innovative idea (Airtable or others) and try to muscle them out using capital or a captive customer base. We need new anti trust laws.

reilly3000• 6 years ago

I didn’t see much in the way of docs from the micro site at least. I’m wondering if there is IAM integration or the ability to call Lambdas. Those would be Airtable-killer features from where I sit.

dane-pgp• 6 years ago

Yeah, imagine an "app store" for Lambdas that work with this, or just a trend of SaaS companies making their APIs "Honeycode-compatible".

pldr12342• 6 years ago

I think the problem is, it's easy enough to glue to Airtable (lovely API), and the other problem is I'm not sure how you'd generalise the power of Lambdas to a consumer, for whatever this Honeycode thing is.

gdsdfe• 6 years ago

Interesting ... there's a big push towards this "no code, low code" solutions lately in the industry, I wonder if this is just to sell more cloud services?

cbdumas2• 6 years ago

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do.

I work with business stakeholders creating internal line of business apps a lot, and most of the time the requirements that they are able to articulate are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions.

And by the time you've got enough experience to be able to do that, tools like this just get in the way compared to writing some Python or SQL or C# or what have you.

unicornfinder• 6 years ago

Indeed. The hardest part of my job isn't writing code. It's in understanding the problems and working out how to solve them.

dahfizz• 6 years ago

That's because you already know how to code. For someone with no programming experience, the programming would be the hard part.

nickff2• 6 years ago

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

grumple• 6 years ago

Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

robbyking2• 6 years ago

I don't think they were saying learning to code is easy, per se, just that it's not the only barrier to launching a successful product.

Quarrelsome• 6 years ago

You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell.

But they should. People aren't stupid, shells aren't horrifically complicated if you try a bit and once you climb that hurdle you're suddenly a "tech genius".

cbdumas2• 6 years ago

I think you're right about perceived barriers to entry, and I certainly didn't say (nor did I mean to imply) that anyone should "just" learn to code. But I think the promise of "apps without code" is a siren song, always ending in frustration.

I'd never tell anyone that learning to code is easy (only that most people can do it with some hard work), but I would also never tell anyone that tools like this will make it easier because I do not believe that to be true.

chii• 6 years ago

writing a good (english) novel is not just about learning the english language and grammar. But it is required that the novelist understands the english language well, but it's not sufficient - the novelist also needs a good grasp of more abstract concepts and have creativity as well.

fnord77• 6 years ago

they teach python in business school these days, so I think programming is more accessible than ever.

analog313• 6 years ago

Indeed, I've observed that while programming seems easy, a large fraction of people find learning to program is utterly prohibitive. This includes many really smart people. And I don't think we understand why.

But here's what I think you give up if you don't have code. Over the past 70 years, one of the problems that computer science has studied is how to manage the size and complexity of programs and development teams. This complexity includes not just the program you're working on, but potentially the entire ecosystem of algorithms and solutions available for your use. Nothing comes close to "code" for addressing this problem.

As a result, I think if you're going to give up code, you have to accept that your projects will run out juice if they get too big or complex, or that you will have to solve some interface problems with manual steps. That might be perfectly OK.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

I think it's a case of a bit of both.

ozim3• 6 years ago

Point of low code is to get rid of those smart ass developers who know those magic incantations and demand loads of money for their work.

What you get in low code reality are smart ass business consultants that know magic configuration options and demand loads of money for their work.

Just look at SAP, Salesforce etc. From my point of view any barrier to entry doesn't matter because at some level you just trade one complexity for the other.

For non complex stuff excel works fine and low code is not advertised as alternative to excel.

rimliu• 6 years ago

There are enough bariers in the earlier steps for those barriers to entry with programming not to matter.

   1. Understand the problem
   2. Break the problem into subproblems. Goto 1 till subroblems
      are small enought to be tackled.
   3. Develop the algorithms for each of the subroblems you got
      after step 2. No handwaving allowed. 
   4. Implement the algorithms.

I'd say for majority it ends around the step 2. Programming only matters at step 4.

davewritescode• 6 years ago

The only thing low-code solutions do is lower perceived barriers, not real ones. A low code solution has done it's job if it got you to sink enough time into it that you're stuck with it. They're great for prototypes and simple tasks.

Low code solutions work by presenting a simplified view of the world to the user. Once your vision doesn't mesh with their abstraction, you end up having to dive under the hood if you're lucky enough to have a solution that lets you. In the best case, you've now had to learn the underlying tech and the abstraction.

justanotherc2• 6 years ago

I think he's partially right, and you're also partially right.

Learning to code is an extremely high barrier to wntry, but its also highly transferable. If you can write Python, there's tons of jobs you can get writing Python, and with a little extra work, you can pretty easily transition to another language with a whole other world of opportunity.

The problem with these "visual" languages, is its a lower barrier to entry, but its still takes a detail oriented person, and ends up being very specialized, so there's less opportunity to leverage that to another job. So if you're a person than can learn a visual language effectively, you might as well go the extra 30% and learn to code in a "real" language.

cbsmith• 6 years ago

I think the emphasis here ought to be on "perceived".

Having taught people to code, there's a lot of "perception" about what is hard that you need to overcome, but in practice, people learn that part comparatively easily.

coliveira2• 6 years ago

I agree that coding is the easy part. But exactly because of that it shouldn't get into the way. I really think that is useful to have tools to generate simple apps without coding. Who wants to create the thousandth CRUD app? It is nice to have a tool capable of create apps from simple logic and reserve programming for when it's needed.

nightski• 6 years ago

At the end of the day you have to translate requirements into software. Whether that is through a GUI or textual. Textual just happens to be an extremely effective method to do so.

Every application in existence is a CRUD app. Software is just data processing after all, reading and writing bits.

lubujackson• 6 years ago

That's the theory, but don't forget the time you spend upgrading Python because some dependency needs it, but some other part isn't compatible with the new version so you spend an hour on Google trying to sort that out.

Or the time you spend trying to debug some basic functionality you've written 20 times before because it isn't quite working with everything else for some reason...

mehrdadn• 6 years ago

Is there even a way to update Python on Windows? I haven't figured out any way other than duplicate installs, a bunch of manual copy/paste/extract of older packages, and hoping for the best.

sipos• 6 years ago

That is true, but, equally, you are underestimating the time you spend trying toi do something that your no-code framework can't do, and the extra cost of working with it.

TrackerFF• 6 years ago

I guess it depends on what you're writing for.

When I made the move from native software (Windows applications w/GUI in .NET) to web applications, I found the transition to be _extremely_ overwhelming.

And for the most part, the frustration came from trying to manage setups and dependencies, and keeping up with the bazillion of packages.

I can absolutely see a beginner getting turned off by the initial process of just setting everything up, before a line of code has been typed out.

heavyset_go• 6 years ago

Tools like this are great for getting 80% of the way there, which is often enough in some contexts. I look at these tools like I look at spreadsheets: you can stick a surprising amount of business logic in them, and while the thought of using them might make developers shudder, they get the job done.

If you need that extra 20%, hand the resulting project off to professionals to build an application out of it.

sktrdie• 6 years ago

Great insight. Since the process of creating software must be pedantic, then it seems we must push towards ways of sharing the burden with as many people as possible, and not just ones that can understand the "computer way". And I agree with you that a new-shiny-tool is not pushing towards this direction.

jimnotgym2• 6 years ago

I can't agree enough with what you wrote, but I can add some colour.

'It is impossible to automate this club with 100 membership options and 300 members, it is just too complicated'. I think there is some complex psychology behind statements like this. There are elements of not knowing what is possible, elements of not knowing how to break down a problem, but also an element of not wanting someone from IT to come along and show you that the job you care about and you have to work hard at can be automated away. I tend to approach these things by building rough prototypes of the simplest case, and using that to find the edge cases. All the while using lines like, 'this will allow you to concentrate on the sales part of your job, rather than admin'. But here is the truth, most people want stability in their work life, and are terrified of what systems people might change.

In another sales-order flow project I worked on I was suspicious of the time taken to manually intervene with orders (I was worried it was stopping us from scaling), so I started asking questions like, 'what takes you a long time?', 'what could be improved?'. Apparently nothing, it was all fine. We started to map the process out and began the tedious work of finding out how the manual process works....one day the person was frustrated with one element of their job and let slip about a process that took hours that had apparently slipped their mind previously. This was manna from heaven. I attached two senior developers to the team and they fixed that problem in half a days coding, but it couldn't go live because x needed doing first. I let them do x, and they found y..so it took around three months more to fix this simple flow, I would say there are in the order of 1000 loc generated in total. I agree, it is the human part of these kind of systems that is hard, not the coding.

Icathian• 6 years ago

This perfectly articulates my experience. If everything was as simple as the resulting python code they'd never need me.

rahimnathwani2• 6 years ago

~20 years ago, I spent a year or so mostly creating and updating Lotus Notes 'apps' for internal use at my employer. Most of these were CRUD apps to support existing business processes.

The v1 of each one, which was immediately useful and used, usually took me 4 to 8 hours to create. That includes the time talking to the main user to understand what they needed.

I can't achieve the same speed with Django or Flask. Maybe others who are more experienced developers can?

raihansaputra2• 6 years ago

That's interesting. Personally, learning Django to be comfortable with it takes quite some time for me. Translating the business process to code means you have to be comfortable with the framework, no matter what you're using. What do you often you feel you're stuck on?

OOPMan4• 6 years ago

If all you need is a simple CRUD app then Django Admin + your model definitions is literally all you need.

In my experience, that's a 4 to 8 hour project.

Oh, and runs against a real database.

dayvid• 6 years ago

The main advantage of "coding without code" that I could see is not dealing with the server and software configuration issues that come up when you code. This can range anywhere from:

- Updating the server the software's hosted on - Dealing with system errors installing software - Setting up software on your company's webserver (and dealing with firewalls) - Installing necessary plugins which may require installing new software that's not compatible with your version of Linux, etc. - The fact that a lot of web software is designed for a Linux environment and can be completely foreign for someone with a Windows background - Updating the software you're coding on

iamEAP• 6 years ago

Although you shed some of this type of maintenance overhead, you are still taking on the burden of maintaining business logic.

The difference is that now, you lack the vast and mature test automation ecosystem to help manage that cost, and more importantly, the friction of shipping changes is completely gone.

proc0• 6 years ago

Yes, precisely this. It seems abstracting applications at that high level will inevitably bake in the business process which is very different for each business unless the application isn't interesting or complex enough. I'm sure within a specific domain, a tool like this can be made (it's usually too costly), but at an abstract level to build any application is missing the real challenge that enterprise software has.

tylerjwilk00• 6 years ago

I agree with this.

Just this week I had a lengthy 2 day discussion involving 4 other employees, 8+ long emails, and hundreds of words in chat ... all to figure out that we need to add an if/else statement and two simple lines of code.

The code took 2 minutes. The discovery took 2 days.

The "curse of knowledge" works both ways.

opportune• 6 years ago

I frequently implement such features.

Of course it's not the code itself that is complicated, but what do you want the overall system behavior to be (are there upstream/downstream/breaking effects?) and why. And do you understand the system well enough to know the right way to make the change - sure it only took you 2 minutes to code it but that's because you already understood the system well enough to know the right place to change the behavior.

austincheney• 6 years ago

Your comment underscores a few misconceptions with corporate software.

1. Writing and process flow as you describe are incredibly important. But, many developers can’t write. Writing is a fundamental skill that takes practice to develop and many developers do not independently practice that skill, despite its importance.

2. The web is a multi-faceted discipline. This is the hardest part to being a web developer. Learning to write the code is comparatively trivial. This is also the greatest cause for frustration and failure for people and automagical software alike.

3. Precision of requirements is important but not as important as many junior developers would suggest. The discrepancy largely arises because many developers find writing to that detail challenging themselves and are frustrated when feature delivery fails to match stakeholder expectations. QA and PMs seem to regularly nail this issue without challenge indicating its not the requirements that are ultimately at fault when things move out of alignment.

zitterbewegung• 6 years ago

I think a lot of these low code environments are trying to capture people when they prototype software using Microsoft Excel. The thing is if your stakeholder can also make the product it will save you a very large amount of money and then you could hire someone to port it to Python.

patrickthebold• 6 years ago

I'm pretty skeptical of your assertions, here's why I think this will be big:

Many people aren't even going to try to do anything involving code, and it doesn't matter if they could if they tried, because they won't.

Lots gets lost in communicating with a developer.

Creating one of these honey comb things is going to force who is working on it to be precise, in a much better way than talking to a dev (or writing a story). In no small part because one can play and experiment without being intimidated by a dev. It might be buggy but the feedback loop is tight, the creator can see errors and fix them fairly immediately.

The result probably won't be beautiful, but neither is anything I end up producing.

wwweston• 6 years ago

You're both on to something.

Like the parent says, there are absolutely going to be people who will be defeated by Honeycode (or any other solution no matter how easy) because they simply can't or don't develop a model of the domain that an app can serve as an interaction point for.

As you say, there are absolutely going to be people who can do that, with Honeycode or something else, but are put off by the specific arcana of some language/dev environment. Just like there are people who don't think of themselves as developers but do an awful lot of spreadsheet work.

ozim3• 6 years ago

There always will be a developer, it might be some business person instead of dev but that will be an owner of some app. You don't want to create new application each time. Most of applications are there to be maintained.

You hire new accountant and what he does just throw away all records and build his own app from scratch?

Someone will create that honeycode thing and then he will be responsible for changes in that application.

In the end you have a maintainer on that app and lots will get lost in communication with him.

On the other hand you might have one off apps that are needed for specific task, but that is what excel is for. Reading about honeycode I see it is not about throwaway one off apps. So there will be someone who is "developer" who has to know details of honeycode and application he maintains and bunch of people with requests who don't bother learning what that honeycode thing is.

bredren• 6 years ago

unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software

Preach! This was something I did not understand when I was only doing non technical product stuff. Now that I build I look back on my interactions with developers differently. I feel their pain so to speak.

I don’t know if builder tools like this thing perhaps create bumpers around the many pitfalls associated with turning analog into digital, but I’d presume eventually they’ll get good enough to act like the automated customer service you get from amazon support chats.

thunderbong• 6 years ago

I totally agree.

I've worked with multiple companies who've had some form of no-code products. In every case, incorporating the full gamut of business requirements entails in too much of configuration and complexity in the UI. At this point, there are only two options left for the user -

1. get trained in the software which itself is time consuming and a challenge

2. ask the vendor company to create the app, which kind of defeats the whole purpose

A few other points -

1. People to whom no-code apps are targeted tend to be in the management rather than the actual users of the system. Management is usually aware of the bigger picture or the more complete workflow.

2. However, managements requirements tend to be more around tracking, reporting and monitoring.

3. The last issue being management tends to get caught up too much in the UI rather than the underlying functionality.

Unless no-code services restrict themselves to a very specific niche with clear workflows and fewer options of customizability, the products are bound to be cumbersome, complex and having a very narrow applicability.

devonkim• 6 years ago

I think “no code” systems like these are mostly of value for people that want to produce some demo / prototype apps that they can then use to pitch around and then get resources for programmers to flesh out better. If said person cannot come up with such an app without involving a programmer, I’m afraid that the person is not knowledgeable enough in the target domain’s technical details to be giving guidance to a programmer.

theturtletalks• 6 years ago

No-code actually pushed me to learn how to code. I started building an app using Bubble.is and although it worked, it wasn't polished. Learning to build an app on Bubble gave me the confidence that I could actually learn to code. No code is a great segue for early tinkerers into Python or JS.

systematical2• 6 years ago

I mean, writing code that is good enough to easily work with is actually pretty hard. I've yet to come into an organization where I am like "damn, that is some pretty good legacy code yall have there." I can't even look at my old code and say that, certainly not my earlier work. Mind you, I'm not even saying great code. Nothing about design patterns, unit tests etc... just good enough to not be complete fucking spaghetti with 3,000 line classes and 500 line long methods that take you down the rabbit hole.

TL;DR I had a tough day on legacy system because learning to write code is easy and learning to write good code is hard. I actually saw this today "SELECT %s FROM %s WHERE %s JOIN %s";

ako3• 6 years ago

That is exactly what some of the low-code tools aim to address: by having a visual, highly productive tool, you enable better collaboration with business stakeholders.

Requirements gathering becomes an interactive process where you sit together with a business stakeholder to model your application together: by doing it in a visual manner, the stakeholder can understand what you are doing, and you can process suggestions and feedback in seconds, so that the stakeholder can immediately validate the results of a change.

Doesn't work for all requirements, but in many cases you get better software because you understand the requirements better.

sciprojguy2• 6 years ago

This is all great until you get to the stakeholder who prototypes something in Excel (or Honeycode, I guess) and since it only "took them a few days to do this" can't understanding why scaling it up takes six months or a year and won't listen to you when you try to explain that they under-spec'd the system by an order of magnitude.

(This happened a lot when Visual Basic came out - management types would spend a weekend playing with the visual UI editor and then give the developer a week to fill in the complicated business logic behind it.)

(Developer here who has t-shirts older than a some of the people posting)

gitgud• 6 years ago

well, I think that's understating the value of a no-code tool like this. By having the right abstractions, apps are easily changeable (in a GUI), which means anyone in the business can make changes to the application.

However, the key here is right abstractions, sometimes seemingly tiny changes are impossible in these no-code solutions due to the abstractions that were chosen.

So no-code tools are actually extremely rigid in comparison to programming languages, but they still have a place and I believe it's still a growing industry.

zrobotics3• 6 years ago

>the requirements ... are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions.

I (mainly) work in inventory management and this is so very true. For our specific requirements, there wasn't anything in the SaaS space that would work short of SAP or Oracle, no other vendor had all the requirements in one package.

However, our quality control department had tasked me with writing standard operating procedures (SOPs) for most of our receiving & warehousing processes. I swear, those .docx files took longer to write than the custom inventory solution I ended up coding. However, most of that SOP time was sitting in front of a whiteboard trying to figure out how to explicitly define all the processes in detail. This experience was incredibly valuable though, I'm convinced that having to define the business process beforehand made the software vastly easier to write. I spent more time getting django configured & setup than coding the business logic, and the business logic was complicated enough that I couldn't find an off-the-shelf solution.

I've since done this for some other projects at the same company (I wear a lot of hats), and spending 1/2 a day bothering the 'customer' with my incredibly pedantic questions while we drew up a flowchart or bulleted list saved so much time down the road with catching edge case bugs. Note that I'm not talking about waterfall style dev, this only focuses on the actual business process and not at all on software. There aren't any questions about how the software should function, but instead 'if a customer has this problem, what do we do?' The trouble is, this strategy wouldn't work if you can't force the user to spend quite a bit of time on what is an unpleasant process for everyone.

serverQuestion• 6 years ago

I think its good to realize that the waterfall method really encourages this. Thinking through everything before building can really help formalise informal workflows.

... then you get into standardised work flow diagrams and you are so far into UML that it just becomes programming again.

cies• 6 years ago

the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part

It does make you cloud/product/service independent. From Amazon's (or Mendix', or what every code-without-code product/service) perspective you are not vendor-locked-in enough.

noir_lord2• 6 years ago

Sounds like we have a similar career track.

My joke is that the only place a stakeholder should hold a stake I'd through the heart (on the bad days).

Some stakeholders are brilliant they explain what they want in sufficient detail and get out the way.

The worst are the ones who try to tell you how the software works internally.

You don't hire a builder and then interfere with every brick course laid down, at least if you want the wall finishing on time.

conjectures• 6 years ago

Actually, I think this has the potential to increase empathy between pure-business folks and coders. After having a crack and encountering the inevitable bumps in the road, more people will realize writing software isn't just about knowing some funny syntax.

switch11• 6 years ago

this is such a beautiful comment. So very true

shireboy• 6 years ago

I feel like this is pretty spot on to my experience with these tools. I've tried lots of these tools, and been in place to have to recommend them to customers looking for workflow and forms tools "so our business analysts can build things". Inevitably, the developers end up having to use the tool and feeling hamstrung by it.

After tinkering with this one, areas I see lacking are 1) no authentication 2) no images and 3) limited automation options. I'm sure it's coming in later releases, but just an example. Even tools like AirTable etc. that do have auth are often lacking. For scenarios where you want users to only see "their" data, managers to see their employees' data, and vps/admins to see all data are common scenarios that are often hard to implement in these tools.

I'm watching this space for a breakaway, but haven't seen one that I feel is better than written code. I admit bias as a dev, but I do wonder if written code is not fundamentally superior in most cases. Even "Visual Studio" ceased being visual drag-and-drop for most people ages ago. Sure, you _can_ still drag-and-drop windows forms apps, but most devs will write XAML, or in web space, use a CSS framework and markup instead of a drag-and-drop designer.

thomasrognon2• 6 years ago

For scenarios where you want users to only see "their" data, managers to see their employees' data, and vps/admins to see all data are common scenarios that are often hard to implement in these tools.

This is exactly a major problem I'm solving with https://www.cloudternal.com. I would absolutely love to show it to you and get your feedback on it if you have time (my email is in my profile).

kinj28• 6 years ago

I agree. I am a NoCode fan. I run a small operations of a few million dollars and to run it in Systemic way I built a lot of systems with NoCode as i didn’t have the luxury of putting engineers on the job. While I am an engineer myself, my day job was to run the ship and which meant I had little time available to make systems. 1st google spreadsheet is where I started and quickly made apps for recording attendance and crm and other stuff. Soon I hit a wall and had to have engineers deployed. However since last year I started using a NoCode tool to build all internal apps and today I and my HR manager have put up a fully functional system right from attendance, pms, timesheets, project management, crm , sales , purchase and everything you can imagine as a fully usable web and mobile app.

I must say if the tool has a right type of user identified then nothing can beat noCode.

cultofmetatron• 6 years ago

what tools do you use to set all that up? I'm bootstrapping my own startup and most of my brain is occupied for a few critical areas and would love to be able to better ration my "coding mental energy"

HeavyStorm• 6 years ago

This comment spawned a whole thread that completely fails to acknowledge that there are successful no-code and low code platforms. In fact, Honeycode isn't novel, it's just Amazon's response to Microsoft PowerApps.

Surely, building apps with such accelerators is limited. You're trading customization power for speed to market, and you get a lower barrier to entry which enables business focused people to build stuff they need.

Those apps aren't for everyone and I don't think any enterprise will be able to live with just these platforms, but enabling users to live without IT has a lot of value.

wuwuno• 6 years ago

As a technologist I'm surprised that you need this processed explained to you.

It's progressive improvement. It's trial and error, without this process we'd never ever make progress.

ivan_ah• 6 years ago

So, this is like Neonto Native Studio[1] but with less focus on looks and UI, and more on business worflows? I can see how this would be useful for many businesses with rag-tag processes, being able to combine on a easy-to-watch app that everyone has on their phone would be nice.

[1] http://neonto.com/nativestudio

darepublic2• 6 years ago

What we need in this space is basically a UI where you build out what the presentation of the data looks like, what the permissions will be, and then an app gets generated for you automatically. You see the generated product and can then iterate but instead of with devs with tireless coding automatons

ngcc_hk2• 6 years ago

Is it the fourth generation language once again? Quick Master from ICL anyone?

jonplackett• 6 years ago

The downside... portability. Amazon now own your ass.

fosk• 6 years ago

Yahoo! Pipes tried this more than a decade ago, it's interesting to see that the dream of "apps my mom could build" never dies.

Except most people want to be consumers of applications, not creators. And those who really want to be creators they learn how to code. So, like with Pipes, I am not really sure who is the target audience here.

Microsoft Popfly[1] was another one from back in the days.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

robbyking2• 6 years ago

I remember in 2002 when .NET came out they had a tool that turned UML into method stubs with pseudo-code, and I was sure that my career only had a few years left before it was fully automated away.

pandalicious• 6 years ago

"apps my mom could build" kind of describes Excel workbooks. People effectively use excel to build (highly constrained) GUIs for processing data using custom logic that they specify themselves. And excel's popularity speaks for itself, it's completely pervasive. So that's the answer; the audience isn't programmers, it's the officeworkers all over the world currently using Excel to automate office tasks and want a better delivery mechanism than a shared Excel file on the office LAN. That's such a big pie that even capturing a small slice of it might be a reasonably profitable endeavor.

miek• 6 years ago

You are spot on. I know a ton of people who fit your description. I wish this were higher up the comment stack. So many people are missing this simple viewpoint.

outworlder3• 6 years ago

Give me an intuitive, drag and drop enviroment where I can plan out my AWS deployments and tie resources together, and then write the cloudformation for me. Then I'll be happy.

Also, this thing requires a different login even though I'm logged in to an AWS account with corporate SSO. Like quicksight and other tools do, and it's just as infuriating. Just let me start using and bill for usage.

alex_young• 6 years ago

Sounds a lot like Google App Maker, which is now scheduled for shutdown in January 2021.

https://developers.google.com/appmaker

gator-io• 6 years ago

What's the saying? Code-less environments make 90% of building an app simple, and 10% impossible.

didip• 6 years ago

I love it for the purpose of building custom internal apps.

What would make it better is if:

* It’s open source, therefore installable on-prem and free from vendor lock-in.

* It has multiple swappable backends.

This thing and Bootstrap can replace a myriad of random in-house apps.

kirillzubovsky2• 6 years ago

Using data tables to publish websites and apps is an interesting concept and having an in-house tool to produce most commonly requested ones makes total sense. Look at their templates: Inventory management, Team Tracking, Surveys, Reporting...etc. It makes sense.

One hard problem here though, by the looks of it, the tool is a database designed by engineers in response to a lengthy requirements document. It has no regard for user experience, and is one of those things you can use, only if you go through a 3 week training course.

This, imo, is where AWS could borrow from startup playbook, and instead of launching a spaceship, start instead with a paper airplane. Imagine if all you could do was to publish an inventory-management tool, that in one-click integrated with Amazon Pay and let the customers buy your products on a website?

Maybe Amazon is waiting for someone else to build this on top of their tools, and then make it available, but that poses a question why. Why would someone build on top of Honeycode, only to have Amazon eventually make it their own?

Interesting concept, but it's got a long ways to go before anyone needs to be scared of what Amazon can do with this thing.

kirillzubovsky2• 6 years ago

p.s. One thing I can't figure out is if Honeycode can function as an API. If I am already using AWS for my other infra, keeping my data inside their "Excel" and then auto process and export it to somewhere using drag-and-drop automation, that makes perfect sense.

In fact, the whole "no code" Dreamweaver analogy isn't all that fitting. If they just said "Excel spreadsheet on steroids that integrates with other AWS product," would make more sense, to me at least.

stoavio• 6 years ago

Too bad this is just another low-code CRUD offering for SMB/Enterprise. This would have been so much more interesting if it allowed me to build an app for mobile and web with a custom domain, database modeling and storage, integration-eque triggers/automations, all while keeping the underlying platform invisible to the user. Instead, I have to create a team on AWS and then invite members who then have to install the Honeycode player on their phones just to use my app.

In other words, Bubble needs more competition.

caetris1• 6 years ago

It's cloud-native Visual Basic.

harrisreynolds• 6 years ago

Not surprising to see Amazon get in the game with a #nocode tool. I will be interested to compare this with Webase [1] where we've focused first on custom views and the data model but have yet to support custom notifications (coming soon though!).

Although the world still needs lots of developers I do believe there is a BIG opportunity in the #nocode space.

[1] https://www.webase.com

pbreit• 6 years ago

Has anyone ever built a decent app with a tool like this?

buboard• 6 years ago

and we're back to MS Access ! about time, really

glaberficken• 6 years ago

Came here to write exactly this, but thought I'd do a quick Ctrl+F first =)

runawaybottle• 6 years ago

I feel like many of these no-code tools are taking an all or nothing approach that will ultimately ossify into a very specific form.

However, if something like Honeycode also had a robust programming/design API, you allow for tons of flexibility.

We could build a lot of it without code, and we could build a lot of it with code, and even better, we could code more things that can be built without code on an app by app basis.

nyxtom• 6 years ago

Really wish Amazon would stop trying to eat all software startups.

pinewurst• 6 years ago

I see two+ entwined fundamental problems here:

1. Amazon isn't especially known for high quality software. I picture lots of weird corner cases that won't be tested or fixed in their frantic pursuit of new features (which is what's rewarded, like Google if not more so).

2. Sky high Amazon attrition - especially in engineering!* - means that it's always newbies who'll be working on it, under high pressure.

I have trouble imagining a non-trivial corporate app with any kind of lifespan living on this thing.

*I live in Seattle so any Bezbots can save themselves the denial of harsh reality.

careyrouse3• 6 years ago

Co-Founder of https://www.cloudternal.com. I'm really surprised they have a limit of 100k records on their tables. They will have the same issue that Airtable has, it's just not suited for enterprise.

We believe there is still a gap in the "database app for non-technical users" space, so we created one that can handle millions of records, provides granular permissions down to the cell level and targets those creative (yet non-developer) users who end up pushing Excel beyond its usefulness.

sbr4642• 6 years ago

I agree, I tried to upload a 1 Megabyte sized CSV and was promptly shut down (on the trial tier). In 2020, a floppy disk worth of data is too much?

nslindtner• 6 years ago

Looks awesome

FYI: When you try to request early access, I get an SSL error.

thomasrognon2• 6 years ago

Hey there, I set that up. The request early access link is a Google Form so it was an issue somewhere between you and Google. It works for me now, but if it still doesn't work for you, please email Carey personally (email is in his HN profile).

codingdave• 6 years ago

The comments here strengthen exactly what I was thinking - this is yet another flavor of low-code app development. I see similarities to Salesforce, SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Airtable, and all the other startups on this path that don't seem to realize that they are re-inventing modern versions of products that have been around since the 80s.

I spent years in my early career doing Lotus Notes Dev, then shutting down all those apps to go to Sharepoint, then shutting all those down to go to Salesforce. I walked away from that churn about a decade ago to just do SaaS, so I can't truly speak to which of the newcomers has the most promise. But I have yet to see someone take on this market with full knowledge of what came before. I see potential for someone to really learn the in and outs of all such products over the last 30+ years, talk to the folks who have re-done their LOB apps in multiple products over that time, figure out what worked and build a true "best-of-breed" solution.

When someone does do that, I'm all in. Until then... the legacy apps I mentioned above are past their time, so pick your favorite flavor from all the new ones.

viksit• 6 years ago

While I’m always skeptical of no code systems, this is the first one that seems to bring to the web what Visual Basic And Access did for Windows — VBscript, GUI driven layouts and connectors, and eventually the pipeline of programmers who went from VB to VC++ and Java.

Amazon also has the Microsoft—esque brand to really drive this into the Zeitgeist. IMO this might be the most game changing product they have launched recently given how much of a business impact it can have if distributed well. But therein also lies its biggest challenge - Amazon hasn’t historically been good at offering their services to the small businesses and consultants that could leverage this and build for the long tail. I wonder if they have a strategy for that.

ricardobeat• 6 years ago

There is Podio (https://podio.com/) in this space which I think is really cool - or it was when I tried many years ago. Always wonder why it is not more popular.

tyingq• 6 years ago

Google shut down their similar tool: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9682494?p=am_announcemen...

djohnston• 6 years ago

It seems like a start, but unless they're supporting a community plugin ecosystem you'll be at the mercy of what their team decides is worth integrating. Maybe it doesn't matter.

dennisgorelik• 6 years ago

Ability to write code - is the main way to deal with application complexity.

If Amazon Honeycode does not have that critical feature (ability to write code) - then Amazon Honeycode is useless for creating any complex applications.

julianeon2• 6 years ago

Are there any tools where you can design something in the UI, and then export it as actual React or JavaScript code, that you can then take and upload somewhere else?

Using low-code as a developer to iterate faster, and bang out lots of mini code apps quickly, is an interesting idea.

papito• 6 years ago

The idea of code generation is not new - but it seems like the new crop of software developers are learning the same concepts and lessons all over again. Hey - state machines are so hot right now.

Back in the day there was this cool concept of creating a bunch of UML diagrams for your business logic and them BOOM - press a button and here is your C++ code. But then architecture astronomy hits the asphalt and you realize that most of the hard work is still ahead. So things like IBM Rational Rose were only sold to suckers.

mango_indian2• 6 years ago

I am trying, https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

rickyplouis• 6 years ago

These types of tools seem excellent for prototyping, but always fall short in addressing the real world issues of increasing scope and maintainability. No code web development (Wordpress, and Squarespace) has largely thrived due to blogs and largely static content, but I fail to see a similar use case in mobile app development. Maybe it's a lack of imagination, but how valuable is a tool like this outside of todo lists, blogs, and other minor use cases?

ngcc_hk2• 6 years ago

Not for Hongkonger though. Browser work but that is not the point. Is it just USA?

systematical2• 6 years ago

It's a spreadsheet and for when you need more (aka have to write some code), there are conditions, functions etc... https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-functions/90

kayman• 6 years ago

In my experience, when people build apps without having to write code, the first iteration is awesome. Get something working and shows great promise. But as complexity grows, the app ends up being a badly designed excel screen on the web.

topicseed• 6 years ago

This is a great way to prototype some simpler, mostly CRUD-like applications.

Definitely not future-proof as new business rules may be hard to add after a while, but by then the PoC has shown its value and ROI, and writing a real app might become a no-brainer anyway.

atulatul• 6 years ago

This is not related to main content of the post. But when I visit the page on a laptop, a sizeable portion is taken by the header- two or three layers in a div (lb-clearfix m-nav-double-row)- one of which is logo and create account ( blank space between logo and button), then the menu bar (blank space on the right below create account button), then the blog menu and search. In the main section body, a large portion on the right is white space. I have not done UI UX for a few years. Is this a good design? Are there reasons behind it? (views on mobile, etc)

theptip• 6 years ago

So how do you unit / integration test your code in this paradigm?

Or is this just for apps that would otherwise be run from a spreadsheet, and not displacing anything an engineer would build?

TrinaryWorksToo• 6 years ago

This is basically Microsoft Access forms.

mortonpe• 6 years ago

Is Honeycode for everyone? Nope. Is it for some people? Sure. I’ve read through countless comments extolling the virtues of hiring python, java, or (insert your favorite language) developer. Let’s not lose sight of the customer. Some problems don’t need a perfect solutions. Some problems need a solution that is more concurrent than excel. Some problems just need a quick solution for now. You would be surprised to learn how many small business run in these imperfect solutions.

hannasm• 6 years ago

And if if ever gets discontinued you lose everything you might have ever built forever.

brisance• 6 years ago

Seems like an AirTable/PowerApps competitor, but an early version which means the polish isn't there. Personally I prefer Coda.

wsc981• 6 years ago

When looking at the website, I do think this could be a very decent product that could fulfil a business need.

From what I've seen many businesses use Excel sheets as a sort of apps. And this seems to be a mobile-compatible version of that idea. Of course it'll be very limited, but for a certain niche of business apps it could be very useful as a replacement for Excel.

Illniyar• 6 years ago

So this is Microsoft Access as a service?

guerrilla• 6 years ago

Looks like it. My first thought was Filemaker Pro or the old Claris Works/AppleWorks Database program.

ezconnect• 6 years ago

Delphi was my first experience on apps without much coding, it helped me understand event driven programming.

pembrook• 6 years ago

From the looks of it, I’d say Amazon applied the same level of UX thinking into this as they applied to the AWS admin panel—which is to say, not enough.

I think using this in the real world will be about as easy as trying to buy the right phone charger on Amazon.com. People consistently underestimate how long it takes to learn complicated interfaces. At which point you might as well just learn python.

Take any advanced 3D modeling software for example. They are visual interfaces, not command line tools, but they might as well be considering the learning curve for the average user.

Having visual buttons doesn’t necessarily mean the process of building a 3D model (or a piece of software) is suddenly easy.

ravivyas5• 6 years ago

If you want a new perspective to the entire nocode space, remove the line "building apps" from any conversation or line of thought.

A spreadsheet to track a project need not be an app, the ability to temporarily give access to internal data to a non developer team (which become CSVs in email) is not an App.

It is this need of building a full solution which actually takes us away from the need of the users to the need to justify a resource for the thing.

ciguy• 6 years ago

I'm getting major Microsoft Access vibes from this. I guess we really have come full circle.

pjmlp4• 6 years ago

Looks quite basic versus alternatives like OutSystems.

bram2w3• 6 years ago

A while back Microsoft announced Microsoft Lists, which is a similar tool. Of course there are also existing tools like Airtable, Bubble, Mendix etc. All these tools are great, but they have some downsides in my opinion.

- If the product ever gets discontinued you might lose all your work.

- All these tools have limits regarding the amount of rows you can store.

- If your business depends on such a product and the pricing model changes, it might bankrupt you.

- You can't create or download real plugin that integrate well if you are missing features.

- In most cases you can't host it at your own servers.

- You might end up in a vendor lock-in.

These are some of the reasons why I started Baserow. It is an open source alternative to Airtable and in the far future also for tools like Bubble. While it is still in an early phase there is a test version at https://baserow.io that everyone can try. In the coming weeks you can expect the open source release. Right now, I am finishing up the documentation, examples, plugin boilerplate and some final small changes. After that you can self host it without any limits, vendor lock-in or price changes.

lukeramsden2• 6 years ago

Wow, that looks great. An COSS alternative is exactly what this space needs. I wish you great success.

bram2w3• 6 years ago

Thanks! I agree, was surprised to learn that there aren't that many good open source no-code tools out there.

steveharman• 6 years ago

"Honeycode – Build Web & Mobile Apps Without Writing Code"

For the sake of clarity, couldn't they have come up with a name that didn't include the word "code" ?

koliber• 6 years ago

Is this Amazon's disruption of VisualBasic?

sciprojguy2• 6 years ago

Great. Another ReactNative. Just what we need.

brainwipe• 6 years ago

These kinds of systems are all well and good if you have a person in your business with an analytical mind enough to pick it up and all your needs will fit the limits of the framework.

If your business domain has a feature that doesn't fit then you have a difficult conversation with business people who won't change their process to fit the platform and won't pay to rebuild in a platform that does fit.

If you do manage to customise Honeycomb then you're down a path of not really fitting into their model or having to upgrade on their product roadmap, not yours. I've seen SAP and Sharepoint "installations" that have been customised beyond all recognition.

Where this will fit nicely is for those internal apps where people are just using Excel or Access-like systems.

bencollier49• 6 years ago

The looks remarkably like an Access MDB application.

gonesilent• 6 years ago

Taking the thunder from the coupon code site Honey. Won't be searching for Amazon honey or code and finding real honey. It like doing this with product names.

Aeolun5• 6 years ago

What if I need more than 100k rows per table? Where is the unlimited (enterprise) plan?

dsbanaj• 6 years ago

This works only for the development of simple applications. If these no-code/low-code platforms want to be considered for serious development, they need to decouple front-end and back-end tiers. A developer can build front-end in one no-code application (e.g Webflow), or Angular/React for slick single-page applications; and the backend in another backend APIs specific no-code application. It will also enable the backend code to be called from native iOS and Android apps.

pradn• 6 years ago

I don't see Microsoft PowerApps mentioned in the comments. (https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/) It's one of the most significant recent entrants into the "make an app" space. It looks like Powerpoint and its coding is simple, with formulas like Excel. They sell licenses mainly to companies (creating internal app stores).

DoctorOW• 6 years ago

Not sure if this includes Power Automate but I find it really handy for the work I do. If you're not already familiar with how an API works, being able to point and click on an icon to setup automation is great.

zubairq2• 6 years ago

As a developer of an open source low code tool https://github.com/zubairq/pilot I think it is great that Amazon has entered this space. It really validates it for the mass market!

MangoCoffee2• 6 years ago

Am I correct to say that we have go down to this road before (no code app)?

psmithsfhn• 6 years ago

i was hoping for something at least semi-interesting. not so much. airtable, with a google aesthetic. eh.

i feel like Anvil is on the right, almost perfect, track -- except for their choice of Python over Javascript. They chose self.Python over javascript. ok. life is full of decisions. in their defense, callbackjavascript is...not so promising.

bubble went with..something. right idea. not the best execution. still, a step in the right direction.

saw a couple other tools out there that are trying to cross the chasm, but nothing as good as VB yet.

muddi900• 6 years ago

Sharing data across multiple users and multiple spreadsheets is difficult

=Importrange()

In google sheets.

Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

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