AppSheet. Gesundheit! Oh, we see – it's Google pulling no-code development into a cloudy embrace

Google has cleared the way for non-developers to build applications that make use of Google cloud services with the acquisition of Seattle-based no-code development platform AppSheet confirmed. The idea of no-code and low-code application development is that business users can create solutions for themselves, relieving the …

[Anonymous Coward]

"No-code" is bollocks.

The hard part of code is working out what it is supposed to accomplish, and how it is supposed to do it reliably, securely and without using excessive resources.

This sounds like nothing but a lot of more user friendly functions that you still have to stitch together. A bit like Lego. But if you don't understand basic engineering, the stuff you make with Lego will still fall apart.

[Timmy B]

Re: "No-code" is bollocks.

"The hard part of code is working out what it is supposed to accomplish, and how it is supposed to do it reliably, securely and without using excessive resources."

This..... This is what I've been trying to say to people for ages to somebody.

[woppo]

This is an application!

Apart from editing wikis and designing photo-hosting websites, what substantial applications can be written just by dragging stuff about and connecting things together?

A decent Visio diagram can take days and that's just a diagram.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is an application!

"A decent Visio diagram can take days and that's just a diagram."

Funny, I thought exactly that when I read "Now where have we heard that before?" in the subtitle. Microsoft was selling this exact approach to programming with the birth of .NET and Visio. I knew programmers who were very concerned it was true, even to the point of changing careers. Of course a most of them stuck it out and became "specialists"*. Look how that turned out.

*specialist in programming means someone who actually knows what they are doing and can charge obscene rates to clean up after special people who _imagined_ it would "just work".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is an application!

"what substantial applications can be written just by dragging stuff about and connecting things together?"

Well, here are a few examples that I've been familiar with in the llast few decades:

Example class 1: Lots of substantial industrial automation stuff can be, and often has been, done that way for decades. E.g. back in the mid 1980s when part of what is now being marketed as Industrie 4.0 had names like FunctionChart and FunctionPlan, or local equivalent, e.g. Grafcet. Underlying these things was often a concept called Petri nets, which have apparently become trendy again in the last few years in connection with the application area known as "graph databases".

Example class 2: National Instruments Labview and friends. Is "LabView as a Service" a thing yet? Somehow I doubt it ever will be, but I'm sure people will try to hype it up.

Example class 3: various design, simulation, and test (and other) applications in the field of electronic CAD (and similar related fields).

There are probably more. If you've never heard of these things, that's OK.

Also note that in a way, many of these things are a GUI layer and a set of less-visible tools, and a run-time system - but then, at that level of detail. maybe the pointy clicky web design things from the last decade or more fit that description too.

Anti-example class 1, from 1983: "The Last One", the program that writes programs, was supposed to be "the last programme you'll ever buy". Widely covered in advertorial in e.g. PC Magazine at the time (Google Books seems to find some classics) . Not so widely remembered.

Don't, don't don't believe the hype.

"editing wikis and designing photo-hosting websites"

That's a big part of the problem. The world of "IT" has become dominated by "presentation layer people", from the 'embedded' world to the high volume transactional world, and in lots of places in between.

To these folks, the concepts of concurrency and scalability, robustness, and maybe even security, are largely foreign concepts. E.g. Visio probably is closer to web design than real circuit design and simulation, even though Visio can in theory be used for part of e.g. the network design process.

[DJV]

Re: This is an application!

Oh yes, I remember reading about "The Last One" - some people called it "The Fast One" as "pulling a fast one".

Its notoriety can still be seen around the web in places:

https://modeling-languages.com/last-one-code-generator-basic-1981/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Last One" was 1981 not 1983.

As DJV's post makes clear, The Last One was from 1981 not 1983. Sorry about that folks; software has a long history of being Off By One but being out by two is taking it a bit too far.

Some of the references in the Wikipedia article are quite enligtening, maybe even entertaining:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_One_(software)

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: This is an application!

IBM Data Explorer/6000, which began life as IBM Scientific Visualization System, is another example, from circa 1991. It provided a dataflow programming system for data visualization where the user added processing modules to a directed graph. Users could also write their own modules (in the language of their choice), but drag & drop was the main paradigm.

It's an approach that works well in specific domains. I'm much happier seeing scientific visualization done that way than in Excel, for example.

But, yes, for general business application development, this approach is often oversold, and the market seems to already be well-served. Tableau seems to be reasonably successful, for example.

[andy 103]

"for non-developers to build applications"

"for non-surgeons to perform operations"

We seem to be living in a world where there is an increasing dumbing down of absolutely everything. Having said that this sounds like an ideal platform for the next Government IT project. It'll save on costs because they don't need trained developers and it can be explained to people who know even less than those building said applications.

This sentence can be fixed: "The idea ... is that business users can create solutions for themselves, relieving the burden on stretched development teams." Should read "The idea is that people who are trying to solve problems only to justify their jobs can relieve the burden on people who are smart enough to know nobody else gives a shit and have better uses for their time".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "for non-developers to build applications"

> "The idea ... is that business users can create solutions for themselves, relieving the burden on stretched development teams."

Alternatively: "The idea is that business users can create short-term fixes to what they think are the problems, relieving the burden of adequately investing in their stretched development teams."

[de-em]

How is this different to Google's App Maker....?

https://developers.google.com/appmaker

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple, read the "Goog of Fore!!!" book. Abandon Faster: Elements of Data Mining.

It's all about design patterns.

[Pascal Monett]

"The idea of no-code and low-code [..] is that business users can . ."

. . recreate the mess that was Excel spreadsheets and Access databases spread hither and skilter without any oversight, control or knowledge, thus continuing the entrenchment of companies in the ignorance of the tools and data they are using, meaning no backups and no proper DR scenario in case of trouble.

For God's sake, Google, is there anyone there who understands the value of keeping control over what tools are being used in a company ? Do YOU allow your employees their own databases and code without any oversight whatsoever ? Somehow, I doubt that. So why impose it on the rest of us ?

Oh, silly me, divide and conquer, of course. Carry on.

[DCFusor]

Re: "The idea of no-code and low-code [..] is that business users can . ."

"Sure, it'll be fun" (Black Widow)

When you make it so monkeys can "code" - you end up with monkey code.

I'm reminded of that video of handing a monkey a loaded AK 47 and the resulting scramble.

It's amusing as a video - from well out of range.

[teknopaul]

Re: "The idea of no-code and low-code [..] is that business users can . ."

Famously they do. All Googlers are allowed to spend time on unsupervised side projects.

Turns out some people can write code without the help of a software middle manager.

[RyokuMas]

Scope creep

"... that business users can create solutions for themselves, relieving the burden on stretched development teams...

... until, after a few requests from clients to "just add this bit of functionality" (I'd expect three to four such requests) the "solution" no longer works as intended, and developers are stuck with trying to come up with alternatives against the usual business deadlines.

It's like giving someone who can just about check the oil and tyre pressures a means to take their entire engine apart, but only if they put it back together exactly how it was.

[Rich 11]

Re: Scope creep

I'd say ownership is the biggest problem, just as it is for some custom spreadsheets now. The first thing we hear of it is a phone call from a chirpy admin assistant. Don't get drawn in.

AA: "Hi, IT. Can you take over this app for us, please? Fred developed it but he left last week."

IT: "Who's Fred?" {Wrong answer}

IT: "No." *click* {Right answer}

[DrBobK]

Borland Builder

Can't someone just recreate the simplicity of Borland Builder as it was in the late 90's? Made coding the interface trivial so you could concentrate on the stuff behind. I'm not a professional programmer, but I program a lot (I'm an academic) and nothing seems to have replicated Builder's combination of simplifying building the interface, yet still letting you do whatever you want behind the scenes (I program experiments in visual perception, so I don't care about things like database integrity, but sometimes I want to write programs that other people - students - can use easily).

[andy 103]

Re: Borland Builder

It depends what your target environment is. For many applications now that's a browser. If you learn a frontend library like Bootstrap** it massively simplifies writing the markup and CSS needed to render components. Granted, it's not drag-and-drop, but it's also not hard to learn either.

** there are loads of others but this one seems very popular.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Borland Builder

Slightly OT, but I never really got on with Bootstrap... I've found I much prefer using Foundation.

[TomPhan]

Re: Borland Builder

Perhaps Microsoft will one day bring back VB6...

[disgruntled yank]

Ah, yes.

A while back, somebody showed me an AppSheet app. It looked pretty clever, but I thought, and may have said, "And the underlying data is updated how?" A couple of years later, when somebody noticed how far out of date it was, I learned the answer: it was up to me to write a script.

[iron]

Google and MS have no idea how much I (and I would assume most of my fellow devs) hate the term 'citizen developers'.

Next time Sundar or Satya get their car repaired I reccommend a citizen mechanic. Next time they need surgery how about a citizen surgeon? Google's defense in the Oracle Java API case should be run by a citizen barrister (or barista!). And, I'm sure all those business flights would be cheaper if they just used a citizen pilot.

Yeah didn't think so.

[Alan Bourke]

No no no

We don't want bloody citizens developing.

[cschneid]

Visual Programming

This cycle has been repeating itself since at least the early 90s (if you include the Information Center concept, then a decade prior). From a "catalog of parts," drag and drop icons representing {database, dumb terminal, files in various formats, et. al.} and "wire" them together to produce a result. Paint a GUI and connect it to the inputs and output of those icons.

Security is hard. Data integrity is hard. Compliance is hard. Maintenance, ownership, and governance are necessary.

There seems to be a misconception that the bottleneck in application development is a lack of bodies to do the work, and that any old body will do.

[Doctor Syntax]

"With the rise of low- and no-code platforms, citizen development has emerged as the strategic way for modern organizations to invest, innovate, and compete,"

Like thins? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/06/19/excel_snafu_costs_firm_24m/

[Deft]

I'm OK with it

So some perspective from the other side of the fence. I'm a hobbyist programmer who works in a scientific job. Things like this are occasionally quite useful for very small jobs or ideas. I've used a bit of Power Apps, Power Automate etc. to accomplish some business tasks. Things that aren't really large enough to become a proper IT project. My colleagues generally accept that these apps are probably a bit wonky, might break and aren't supported by anyone. Power Apps as an example though, it's an aggravating middle ground. Not simple enough for an average citizen (in my department at least) but missing some of the key things you'd normally expect in a development environment.

[Fenton]

Spreadsheet replacement

There has to be room for something to sit between a properly developed app and a spreadsheet.

Myself as a non-developer have created a number of "applications" in excel, only to find out that a spreadsheet is totally the wrong tool.

It needs to be duplicated again and again for each project (surely just needs a project key field), then you have endless tables for lookups (mmmm maybe a relational database is needed), very quickly the spreadsheet goes out of control taking 30mins on a fast machine, because I've updated one key field and 1000s of rows and 10s of tabs will suddenly be updated.

The closest I've found is "access" and Googles App Maker, but again if you want to do anything remotely interesting or outside of the tutorials or templates you need to be in full developer mode and any documentation for the intermediate user is non existent.

[Moldskred]

The assumption behind the idea of no-code development as a general purpose tool is that software development is primarily _about_ the low-level technical details. That's as mistaken as believing that writing a novel is primarily about typing and punctuation. Surprisingly, getting a voice recorder and a speech recognition package is probably not going to turn you into a best-selling novelist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiocracy

Especially when, as in the case of one (l)user I encountered, he bought Dragon because learning to type was just too hard, then bought the most expensive Mac available because, of course, a more expensive computer makes you a better writer, and then discovered that his software didn't work on the Mac.

Please don't tell me about Windows on Mac, he refused to "downgrade" his computer by running Windows on it.