I have always been skeptical of using the low-code or no-code platforms. In the past two weeks, two use cases came up.
AppSheet
First, our company needs a time tracking tool. Even though my company plans to use Clockify for time tracking, I thought I’d try one of the no-code platform: AppSheet.
pro: I was able to develop and deploy a basic time tracking app on my phone in about 4 hours. It reads an Excel stored on my company’s network and build a starter app in a few minutes: one view to show all the time entries in the Excel, one view to view the details of an entry and another view to edit/add an entry. I spent the rest of the few hours to customize the app by changing settings of views or data properties(enum, editable, etc.)
con: I would like to make it a bit fancier: when user starts working on a project, she hits the start button to time the project. When she is done, she simply hits the stop button. This would be straightforward to do on any mobile app development framework(Ionic, Java/Android, Objective-C/iPhone), I found it very difficult to do in AppSheet.
PowerApps
The driver to try Microsoft’s Power Apps is to view DevOps work items on my mobile phone. What I want it to do is let me select a DevOps query to run, displays the work items and detail of a selected work item. I was able to complete majority of the development on a volleyball tournament over the President Day’s weekends.
pro: PowerApps is more flexible. You write code like Visual Basic. You can add a canvas. Add controls to the canvas. Modify a control’s properties to change its user interface. Or bind an action(e.g. OnSelect) to a function call(e.g. getting data or navigating to a different canvas), like what you do in Excel(e.g. sum() or average())
con: the action only allows one function call. You can’t write more than one line. It is by design so that PowerApps developer don’t need to write(and debug) a lot of code.
Conclusion
By no means, this is a thorough review of both platforms. But one take away is, like all platforms, they offer convenience by taking away some complexity of coding. However, this also takes away flexibility and power of coding. IMO, PowerApps strikes good balance of convenience and flexibility. They are great to develop simple applications.
I still don’t believe no-code or low-code should be used for enterprise application development, just because of the complexity and massive size of work. I don’t see how tens or hundreds of developers can develop the software collaboratively without overwriting each other’s work. Debugging is also problematic.
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