1) Use the source, Luke

We had a saying back in my early days of developer support at Borland. If a challenging issue came in a senior engineer would tell us "Use the source, Luke" and we would dutifully follow the logic with a breakpoint debugger until the bug/issue revealed itself. Of course, most declarative tools like Visual Builder generate code but oftentimes these types of tools choose to hide the implementation from the app developer.

All of the HTML 5, CSS, and Javascript (as well as required JSON metadata files) are provided for your editing and management.  However, the power of the declarative, drag and drop approach has not been compromised. In fact, Visual Builder contains even more visual tools than ever for not just UI layout and flow, but also creating custom logic, mapping variables and parameters, managing data and object relationships, and more. 

An example action chain of complex, conditional logic from a button press action

Having access to the source code is important, not just for troubleshooting and customization, but also for dev ops. Managing the code in a shared code repository makes the code easily versioned but also gives access for professional developers from whom you may need some custom code. You can also take advantage the advanced features of a dev ops environment, like Oracle Developer Cloud Service (a provided entitlement when you use the Oracle Platform), to manage builds and testing on check-in (push to Git)  for example.

 

2) I find your lack of REST disturbing

REST has become the lingua franca of connectivity to services and Oracle PaaS and SaaS services have quickly adopted it. Visual Builder is all about REST and makes it easy to connect to other services whether they are well described or not. Well described services publish a format, such as Swagger, that describes the API and allows tools like Visual Builder to generate programmatic access to those connections. Visual Builder goes one step further and makes it super simple to select the right API to data bind to a visual control for the proper operation. Visual Builder also connect to the Oracle API catalog as well as your internal catalog to automate the visibility of Oracle services that are readily available to you.

Figure 1: Easily add services into your application from a Catalog, Specification, or Endpoint mapping

Once imported, binding a UI control to your service call is as simple as selecting the right endpoint for your intended operation. Those operations can be generally described as Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) and the typical HTTP request type corresponds as such:

Create = POST

Read = GET

Update = PATCH

Delete = DELETE

Shown below is the declarative approach within Visual Builder to bind a control to some service data. 

1) Add data or create the page for the CRUD action

2) Select the endpoint for the CRUD action

3) Select the fields you want to retrieve or update

Done. Both external service and local business objects present REST interfaces so there is a consistent approach to working with data. 

 

3) These are not the devices you're looking for

The line between mobile apps and web apps have become more blurred over these last few years. It used to be that in order to deliver a "native" mobile experience, you would have to build platform packages (IPA/APK) and deploy through the platform app store. With the "progress" in Progressive Web Apps (PWA), you can deliver apps to your devices without going through an App Store yet still providing a native experience. In this case, a native experience is defined as:

  • Fullscreen app (no browser chrome like URL bar and back/forward buttons)
  • Installed icon on device home screen to launch app
  • Local assets "installed" to improve performance (no need to fetch pages/images initially)
  • Platform specific look and feel

Visual Builder now supports delivering your apps as PWA with the simple selection of the option in your app settings. Within your PWA steins you can add icon sets (Application Image Archive_ and specify which files you want cached when your PWA gets installed on the home screen. 

 

4) Now, witness the firepower of this fully operational app platform

Visual Builder delivers a modern and fresh approach to app development and its encouraging to see rapid application development (now called low-code) techniques being applied to web development with HTML and Javascript industry wide. Whether you are creating extensions to SaaS applications, modernizing existing on-premises systems, or building new web and mobile apps, we hope you'll give Visual Builder a go. And let us know what you think?