From C# to low code

Vitaliy — Thu, 16 Mar 2023 08:37:47 +0000

In this article, I will share my journey with MarsX Low Code, a tool that I have been using for several years. When I first started using MarsX, I encountered some difficulties due to the unfamiliar organization of the code and the peculiar IDE. However, over time, I came to appreciate the convenience of using MarsX for creating websites and scripts.

A little about my experience
I have been programming in various languages for quite some time, but most (before low code) of my time was dedicated to C#. Usually, the transition from one language to another was not something supernatural, but MarsX (Low Code) was a novelty.

That is, js for me was not something unexpected or unknown, but there was a very unfamiliar organization of the code, a peculiar IDE. And all this led to a difficult start on a completely new platform.

I am probably one of those who caught MarsX 2. On it, we started writing and even launched the sale of gift cards for a movie theater. It was definitely a pain. It’s good that the times of MarsX 2 are over 🙂

It has now become the tool that has started to bring profit. We wrote websites for movie theaters and they are 90% similar to each other and MarsX gave us a chance to breed instances for each cinema and not have performance problems, as was the case on a monolith for multiple movie theaters.

MarsX 3 was also far from what I wanted at first, but over time it became a very convenient tool for me, I even used it for writing scripts for the same movie theaters.

I also like the fact that it is very easy to integrate with other systems and that there are many ready-made solutions for various tasks.

In general, I can say that MarsX is a very useful tool for those who need to create something quickly and efficiently, without diving into the intricacies of programming.

MarsX 3 and MarsX 4

Now all the bugs of MarsX are known and don’t cause much negativity, you just treat them as certain limitations or features. And of course, I am eagerly waiting for MarsX 4 in the hope of getting a more pleasant product.

At the developers’ presentation, it is visible that some of the bugs have certainly been fixed, as the core code has been rewritten — for example, if you try to change an un-forked setting through a form, it will create a block without a name.

On the other hand, some things should be understood and accepted — it is unlikely that the bug with cursor positioning has been fixed — in normal software, when you click on a line, the nearest line to the center of the cursor is selected, but in MarsX, the line under the top part of the cursor is selected. It may seem like a minor thing, but quick copying and pasting can be annoying when you just start using MarsX. It may be difficult to understand what I mean when it is described in text.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel over and over

I have tried to use MarsX on other projects several times, but to be honest, time is an issue for me.

Once I tried to write a bot for a fintech, but there the features of MarsX were used to a minimum, mostly server code, it was difficult to apply.

But if I’m creating something from scratch, I will probably take MarsX, so as not to reinvent the wheel, but to do what is needed.

That’s how it turned out with the bot — there were several simple pages with which there was a minimum of trouble.

And still, I have been in this stack for a long time — I will have to learn something else from scratch.

MarsX is already like a drug, there is no time to learn something new, probably it is like this with all technologies.

Overall, MarsX has proven to be a useful tool for fast and efficient development, and I would recommend it to others looking to create something quickly without diving into the intricacies of programming. I am excited for the release of MarsX 4 and hope that it will address some of the issues I have encountered in 3 version.

DEV Community: Vitaliy

From C# to low code

MarsX 3 and MarsX 4

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel over and over