I see no-code builders being launched right, left and centre. Let's talk about them.
I recently came across YCode. If you've ever worked with WordPress before, you'll notice that the no-code builders are very similar to the drag and drop builders used by a lot of WordPress themes like Elementor, minus the need to set up WordPress. Feels like we always had "no-code builders" around; we just called them "drag and drop builders."
Right now, no-code builders seem like an excellent option to create websites which involve basic CRUD operations. But how good are these builders for building something complex, something that involves doing things on the backend, integrating with other applications etc.? Is it possible to create micro-tools, for example, like Typefully using these builders? If yes, please let me know what no-code tools would you need to use to make something like this. At what point/level of complexity should one not use a no-code builder?
I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this.
Top comments (3)
Average no-code fan:
Average libraries/framework/api wrapper appreciator:
I think no code builders should be designed so that others can still manually edit the underlying code after the build process. This would easily make customising easier. But then they would have to be called template generators though.
Builders like this are useless when it comes to building custom solutions. Especially for the complex one. That's why I've been working the whole last year on alternative for developers. The all advantage of no-code builders is pre-made stuff. But it is hard or impossible to make anything custom and whatever we get at the end (if builder is even allowing to export anything) is just a rubbish code. So I wanted to create solution with as much of pre-made or automated functionalities, but leaving developers the full access of code that they can scale project in whatever way they want. Have a look at my last post here on dev.to and let me know what do you think about this approach.