
App Maker, Google’s low-code tool for building business apps, comes out of beta - dgudkov
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/14/app-maker-googles-low-code-tool-for-building-business-apps-comes-out-of-beta/
======
rahimnathwani
During my first job after university, I spent a bunch of time developing apps
using Lotus Notes. Because all of the company's 2000+ employees already used
Lotus Notes for email and calendering, deploying these apps was easy.

And in many cases I was able to develop the basic functionality of a workflow
app whilst I was talking with the main user to gather requirements. And,
although the platform supported a proper programming language (LotusScript,
with almost the same syntax as VB), I was often able to build what I needed
with just the GUI tools and a few formulae (roughly equivalent to formulae in
Excel).

There are a lot of Lotus Notes haters. I think the majority were put off by
the email experience, which is very different from other systems.

But the ease of developing, deploying, updating and using internal-only
workflow applications was truly awesome.

I hope App Maker is as easy to set up, for simple use cases at least.

~~~
Pamar
Hi, I am the guy that came in a few years later and had to reimplement a bunch
of custom (undocumented) Lotus Notes applications in order to move actual
documents to a proper document management system (with access profiles and
searchability) integrating the apps in an intranet portal, allow them to talk
with other applications and finally put everything under SSO.

Thank you for the experience.

~~~
projectramo
I have also found that when I enter a new workplace, everything done before me
was a mess of unwieldy, poorly documented and unstructured code. Worse it uses
an old, archaic platform that is long overdue for a complete overhaul.

Then when I arrive, I make everything logical, nice, structured and proper.

After I leave, once again the place falls prey to disorganized minds who take
my work and mess it up for flashy new technologies that are not as reliable as
what I had done.

For some reason, this keeps happening.

edit: corrected word thanks to @brlewis

~~~
occams_chainsaw
You are also the people before and after you

~~~
zellyn
That's the joke.

------
spankalee
I started this as my 20% project many, many years ago. I since moved on to the
Dart and now Polymer teams, but I'm very, very happy to see the project
launch.

App Maker has been a huge force multiplier internally at Google. Hundreds of
smaller internal apps, many catering to very specific business and HR tasks
were created by non-engineers, often times by the owners of the process
themselves. This self-determinism in custom software - not having to find and
convince engineers to build something for you - is really important as
software becomes critical to the long tail of business processes that have
still been powered by paper, spreadsheets, emails, chat, etc...

~~~
neovive
Congratulations on starting a great project!. I've been experimenting with App
Maker for an internal Edu project and it looks great. I noticed that Drive
Tables are gone; did they not scale well?

~~~
spankalee
Thanks!

Drive Tables is a feature that came and went since I left the team, so I'm not
sure.

------
bigato
After more than two decades in the industry, you start getting cynical towards
these kind of "programming for non-programmers" tools. All of them are trying
to abstract away the complex parts of the programming problem. Guess what, it
doesn't matter how many layers of abstraction you pile up, you never abstract
away the need for consistent logic. You end up requiring the same kind of
people that have the brain skills to actually program.

~~~
dgudkov
It's all relative. One can argue that "true" programmers program in Assembly
and languages like Python or Javascript are just high-level abstractions over
Assembly. SQL is another type of abstraction which was originally intended to
be used by business users (hence the English-like syntax) yet developers are
happy with it now.

There is a need for wide variety of programming tools, ranging from very low-
level to very high-level. Any of them is a trade-off in terms of flexibility /
cost of development. Picking the right tool for the right job will always be a
problem to solve, but having more tools to choose from would never hurt.

~~~
dirktheman
For a good programmer, the language is just a tool to make what you've just
thought out. To me, programming isn't about how to code, but about what to
code. What makes somebody a good programmer is the thought process before a
single character of code is written.

Someone who assembles an Ikea cabinet isn't necessarily a master furniture
maker (altough they could be!). If all you need is a cheap, cookie cutter
coffee table it'll not only do, but it'll be the fastest and cheapest option.
However, if you're looking for a bespoke cabinet with dovetails, you're going
to need a furniture maker.

~~~
dgudkov
>For a good programmer, the language is just a tool to make what you've just
thought out.To me, programming isn't about how to code, but about what to
code. What makes somebody a good programmer is the thought process before a
single character of code is written.

I tend to agree with it but there is a bit of idealization here. How to code
does matter. It helps to not care about RAM barriers, CPU registers, memory
pointers, etc. The span of human attention is only so much broad. Constantly
dealing with low-level details obstructs seeing a bigger picture. Assembly
coders don't think much in terms of type classes or lazy evaluation.

------
pavlov
I suspect Google App Maker will end up effectively abandoned like Google Web
Designer:
[https://www.google.com/webdesigner/](https://www.google.com/webdesigner/)

Google dabbles in these tools, but the business case isn't really there. If
anything Web Designer should have been more likely to succeed because it had a
direct application — designing rich ads — that would benefit Google's primary
moneymaker.

~~~
segmondy
It's a tool for businesses to get a web site presence so they can pay Google
money to promote their sites.

If it makes money, they will keep it. Think about it, Google is paying
$300-$400k per engineer, if they have 10 people working on this that's $3-$4
mil per year plus the cost of infrastructure. If the experiment doesn't pan
out after a few years, they will kill it.

It's strange to me that HN is a crowd that embraces the idea of "experiment
often and toss it if it doesn't work" but then is shocked when Google does the
same.

~~~
2_listerine_pls
> It's a tool for businesses to get a web site presence so they can pay Google
> money to promote their sites.

It's designed to make internal tools, read the freaking description.

~~~
SirYandi
From what I read the applications go beyond just making internal applications,
who's stopping anyone publishing the random little tool they made?

By the way, "read the freeking description" is against HN guidelines and a
little unnecessary.

------
sparrish
I look forward to the consulting revenue I'll be making rebuilding the apps
created by App Maker in about 3 years, when Google shuts it down.

~~~
agentdrtran
It's a G Suite product, they aren't going to treat it like Allo.

------
morog
I for one am quite excited about app maker. Finally a CRUD tool that links to
just about any data source (including spreadsheets), does not require desktop
software, generates properly responsive applications, needs no maintenance or
upgrades to be secure and will presumably be compatible with Google forms.

~~~
bsbechtel
I think Microsoft PowerApps does all that you described, and has been around
for a while now.

~~~
mkane848
I recently started learning PowerApps due to work and yeah, this seems like
Google's "answer" for lack of a better term. I feel like one of the main draws
for PA is that it's got a lot of integration with O365 and the rest of the MS
suite, but does Google have the same sort of enterprise presence to make this
a realistic competitor for market space?

------
zenovision
In the past years Google has deprecated more than 100 services, so I will
never trust them to build any software using their proprietary stack.

~~~
deklerk
[citation needed]

~~~
zenovision
24 deprecated services in 2018 alone (in just 6 months...)

~~~
bitmapbrother
I'm not seeing 24 products in 2018, but just 1 - Encrypted Search.

I just realized you're counting the Others section and incorrectly lumping
them into 2018.

It would seem you also neglected to read Wikipedia's banner above the Other
section that stated:

 _This section is missing information about the discontinuation date of each
product in this section. Please expand the section to include this
information. Further details may exist on the talk page. (October 2013)_

~~~
zenovision
but still more than 100 discontinued services...

~~~
bitmapbrother
What does that have anything to do with your original comment? You incorrectly
stated there were 24 in 2018 when in actuality there was only 1.

------
pjmlp
> any other database that supports JDBC

Did they implement the JDBC p̶r̶o̶t̶o̶c̶o̶l̶ API in JavaScript?!

EDIT: Apparently they did exactly that, [https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/reference/jdbc/](https://developers.google.com/apps-
script/reference/jdbc/)

~~~
zeisss
JDBC is not a protocol, so they probably just created a binding between
Java/JDBC and whatever AppMaker uses

~~~
pjmlp
Yeah, I express myself badly, still they fully replicated the API in
JavaScript.

------
cottsak
How will this not become hell on earth for software developers, al-la
Microsoft Access, Oracle APEX, etc.. ??

~~~
jarfil
If it doesn't lock in data access like MS Access did, it could be seen as just
an interface designer. Whatever data it gets fed, could be migrated from a
simple database to a proper backend if such need arises. It could even coexist
with other front-ends. As long as it doesn't let too much business logic to be
programed into it without a simple way to extract it, it shouldn't be a
problem.

~~~
p_l
The problem isn't that Access locked in data, it was that people stuck with MS
JET engine instead of hooking ODBC server properly - then Access became a
funky, useful UI tool for databases.

------
projectramo
Isn’t Google scripts, forms, tables and drive already a Google App maker?

~~~
candiodari
Google is a huge company. You might wonder what that has to do with anything,
but ... after years of frustration let me just state with absolute certainty:

With VERY few exceptions (like, say, the build system or some backend
infrastructure) EVERY Google project has essentially it's own private
structure, base libraries, framework and things that look extremely close ...
aren't really. Also, even components of the same app don't use the same
framework throughout. It wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't just the case that
Docs and Sheets aren't written in the same language but that the drawings you
can embed in both are implemented in yet another language.

------
freekh
Don't want to sound overly negative but for some reason this makes me think of
SharePoint. I'm sure it's nothing like it though :)

~~~
candiodari
This is Google. We know it'll be one of two things :

1) it'll be convoluted like you wouldn't believe, and enforce an entire
nonsensical 20-tier architecture on you. It'll be forced on everyone for
decades and grow and grow and grow, with 20 different versions deployed which
all support and/or require seemingly random combinations of those 20 tiers
(ie. android)

2) It'll be great, fantastic, simple and work ! Oh, and it'll be canceled
before sundown.

And of course there will be absolutely no-one who ever answers a single
question about it, ever.

------
threatofrain
In many ways I think this is what Microsoft Access should've been.

~~~
Angostura
Well, its more like what Sharepoint tries to be.

~~~
petepete
It's what SharePoint _is_. Except that by the time you've fought through the
awful tooling, horrible performance and useless documentation just to do
simple things you've forgotten (or no longer care) about what the original
problem you were trying to solve was.

This looks much better. Hopefully it's not a Wave-esque Google hobby.

~~~
Angostura
I agree with you entirely. The awful tooling and and useless documentation are
exactly why it is trying yet failing.

The whole thing feels like some kind of amateur hobbyist bit of software where
people have kinda-sorta implemented a feature, then got bored and wandered
off.

------
agentdrtran
I've built a production app internally with app maker and it's quite nice, but
you do need to know more than the bare basics of SQL/JS to really be effective
with it.

------
mleonard
Says it supports CloudSQL? Does it support Cloud Datastore / Firestore or are
they on the road map does anyone know?

------
polskibus
I wonder if Google will deliberately feed the App Maker backlog with features
that enable building functionalities from apps that are hosted on Google
Cloud? That could undercut some of their customers to the benefit of other
customers.

------
zeisss
My first IT job was building apps with Oracle Forms. To this day I miss the
ease of creating a UI and some simple database tables with it.

Sadly this requires a GSuite accounts, so it is hard to try out.

~~~
thrav
You’d like Salesforce

------
avenueb
Quick Base has been running its no code platform for almost 2 decades and does
not tie you to an information or vendor silo - happy to integrate with many
cloud and data integrations.

------
kennydude
This seems to be a big similarity to Zoho with their Zoho Creator software

------
wwwdonohue
Tired of having the services and products you like deprecated and abandoned?
Now you can build your own services on a _platform_ that will end up
deprecated and abandoned!

------
tzahola
Another iteration of the _" managers creating programs by connecting boxes"_
pipe dream.

I pity the engineers in advance, whose job will be rewriting the horrendous
"enterprise apps" this tool will leave behind at the end of its life.

Time is a flat circle.

------
bitcharmer
Yay, another product Google will pull out few months after businesses start
using (depending on) it.

