10 karma · joined August 4, 2020
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Implementing the features you mentioned:
Once you connect your SQL / NoSQL database, you're immediately able to view, query, search, and edit the data. Every record implicitly has a "homepage". On this page, you can add active elements to automate tasks via REST services. We do this using JSONata (jsonata.org) which is a super expressive and concise transformation and query language. You can find some samples in our demo application (https://github.com/dashjoin/dashjoin-demo).
The core philosophy is to get immediate results and refine from there, depending on your cost / benefit calculation.
SDLC:
I think this is a very important point! Even though you're working with low code, it is still a development project with testing, staging, and production, issues, tickets, etc. We allow you to manage the software development lifecycle using GIT. You can view a sample project here: https://github.com/dashjoin/dashjoin-demo. It contains of the DB connectivity information, custom page layouts, queries, and REST function adapters. A developer commits changes to the repository. The production can be configured to pull a certain QAed version.
One of our customers in the public sector builds a Low Code app that performs automated plausibility checks on forms submitted by clients. These checks can be quite complex since they reflect legislation. In this case it is crucial that you can mock form input and validate the checks against expected results.
In our low code platform (https://github.com/dashjoin/platform), you end up writing several JSONata (https://jsonata.org/) snippets for ETL, actions, and visualizations.
These can be tested using junit. All changes to the app can be managed and deployed via GitHub. You can check out our sample app:
GitHub: https://github.com/dashjoin/dashjoin-demo Live: https://demo.my.dashjoin.com/
You might be able to simplify some of the queries using recursive SQL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_and_recursive_que...
Neo4J is a very popular DB (ranks #18 here https://db-engines.com/en/ranking) so should be mature.
Side by side would allow you to formulate queries depending on the use case, but of course this comes with quite some cost (keeping data in sync, having another system to take care of).
Neo4J allows you to store properties, so you certainly could model all your info (also the relational aspects) in it.
Hope this helps!
Would love to hear your feedback! Github: https://github.com/dashjoin/platform
So a Low Code platform can help you in cases where there is no off the shelf solution available for your task.
I have not used JSON API yet but it is cool to see the "follow your nose" approach be applied to REST APIs.
I agree that there probably is no value in using JSON-LD for an application that was built without LD in mind.
Regarding your last statement about APIs. JSON API (https://jsonapi.org/) looks interesting. Have you worked with that?