It makes a lot of sense that this will take place in the website and mobile app world too. I wonder what developers will be doing in 5 years, when most/all CRUD apps can be built with drag and drop.
It makes a lot of sense that this will take place in the website and mobile app world too. I wonder what developers will be doing in 5 years, when most/all CRUD apps can be built with drag and drop.
When I was younger, one of the product managers for the Dutch product SDW told me that programming business software was something of the past as business people could just input 'how the app should work' and the app would be automatically built.
Outsystems have claimed this, as do Longjump and web based systems.
They all have something in common; they work for some cases, if you want more you have a problem. You CAN do it, but it's hard and the resulting 'code' (usually visual programming or 4GL) will usually be bad. Ohyeah, and you're still programming. Worse than you would have with actual developers from the start.
Note that most of them start out as simple systems, like this SteveApp. That's nice; it serves a purpose. But when you get users, people will request features and these feature will, in the end, require a full fledged programming language. So now you have non programmers creating an app up to a point which they still get and for more they'll hire you. They did a bit of 'programming' though in the built in language, which was made easy (which usually translates to visual and/or 'very much like English), so not very terse and often not very well written. Now you have 'code' like this http://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6134596/Screenshots/uo079... and you only have to fix some extra features :)
The trick used by SteveApp is to generate dynamic HTML views which have the ability to save the data over a standard server API. Dynamically generating a markup language is easier, and I think it can be done successfully with a software writing tool.