Amazon has recently announced their new project called Amazon Honeycode which is a no-code tool focused on creating web & mobile applications.
The product goes from a data first perspective, you create a dataset and then visualize it. After importing data, you can manipulate it, create new aggregating columns, rename columns and much more.
Now, let dataset creation just be our strength over at scraper.ai. In this gentle introduction to Amazon HoneyCode we show how to get the data from a crypto website. Afterwards we’ll add the data to the Amazon HoneyCode platform. In the end we’ll have a fully functional web app ready to be published showing the latest crypto prices.
Get started
To get started, head over to a crypto website, in this example we’ll use https://coinmarketcap.com to get the latest crypto prices.
Let’s get the data going by opening up the https://scraper.ai extension. After clicking “Select Element” we select the data we’re interested in, in this case we’ll use:
- Coin name (Bitcoin, Ethereum, …)
- Market cap
- Coin Price
which are also the labels we’re going to give to the fields.
After clicking next twice we’re shown the data we’ve just extracted. As you can see, there is also an API url which we’ll use in a following story.
For now we’ll keep it simple and “Download as CSV”. so let’s hit that button.
Now we have all the data required we can head over to Amazon HoneyCode. Creating an account for their service only takes 1 minute. Afterwards we’re shown the screen below.
Take the following steps:
- Create Workbook
- Import CSV
- Select the CSV we’ve exported in the step above
That’s it for the data, the data is now imported to their data view and we’re ready to use it for our Application.
Let’s create the application by going to the “Apps” panel in the sidebar and clicking the Plus icon. We’ll choose “Use app wizard”.
When we select our newly created table “Table1” as source, all fields will be pre-filled. I suggest using some sensible names and not “Table1”, but to keep this guide easy to follow we’ve gone with the insensible “Table1” name.
After going through the “App wizard”, the app is opened up immediately.
For viewing the app on our mobile devices we have to use the Amazon HoneyCode app viewer (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.amazon.aws.honeycode).
Summary
We’ve learned how easy it is to import data to Amazon HoneyCode and get an app up and running within minutes. For now the Amazon HoneyCode application is rather limited and only supports websites through their own app rather than having native apps. This narrows the scope more to enterprise applications or companies with a good distribution channel.
Amazon HoneyCode has some integrations set up to import data more easily, but for external services it’s quite cumbersome and I hope they’re making the process easier. For now it’s limited to accepted partners such as “Google Analytics”, “Marketo” and more.
In a following guide we’ll show how we can use other AWS services to import data into Amazon HoneyCode on a regular basis. Sadly it becomes rather technical due to the lack of 3rd party integrations available with Amazon HoneyCode.
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