I'll tell you what. Our company had a similar idea to create what today would be called a "low code" solution: a drag and drop interface for building business web-applications. Page definitions are nothing more than JSON, you can think of it as a React application, but the JSX is expressed as only JSON. Several of these apps are deployed in production and do fairly well. The main benefit is that it is fast to configure something new and it is great for standardisation (since only a limited set of building blocks can be used).
Now what you might expect: as business requirements become more complex, things get nasty real quick. You will need to define all sorts of conditional logic inside the JSON tree to fulfill all those crazy business requirements. The JSON structure becomes a programming language of its own, which is impossible to debug, let alone do proper version management (merge conflicts...). When things get too complex you fall back to just writing JS again, so why bother in the first place?
Oh and by the way, since this is all proprietary stuff, you need to maintain the application builder as well. New developers need to learn this highly non-standard tooling.
This sort of stuff is great for letting the end-user create dashboards with simple configurable widgets, but building whole apps this way is a Sisyphean task and can be a huge risk. We're moving away from this approach and writing apps the 'old fashioned way' now that the whole React ecosystem has become more mature.
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I'll tell you what. Our company had a similar idea to create what today would be called a "low code" solution: a drag and drop interface for building business web-applications. Page definitions are nothing more than JSON, you can think of it as a React application, but the JSX is expressed as only JSON. Several of these apps are deployed in production and do fairly well. The main benefit is that it is fast to configure something new and it is great for standardisation (since only a limited set of building blocks can be used).
Now what you might expect: as business requirements become more complex, things get nasty real quick. You will need to define all sorts of conditional logic inside the JSON tree to fulfill all those crazy business requirements. The JSON structure becomes a programming language of its own, which is impossible to debug, let alone do proper version management (merge conflicts...). When things get too complex you fall back to just writing JS again, so why bother in the first place?
Oh and by the way, since this is all proprietary stuff, you need to maintain the application builder as well. New developers need to learn this highly non-standard tooling.
This sort of stuff is great for letting the end-user create dashboards with simple configurable widgets, but building whole apps this way is a Sisyphean task and can be a huge risk. We're moving away from this approach and writing apps the 'old fashioned way' now that the whole React ecosystem has become more mature.