Forward
Preface
Yazz first coined the phrase "Self Service Apps Without the IT Department" in 2019 which sparked the "No IT" revolution. But what does "No IT" mean? Well, the "No IT" revolution refers to a world where IT and technology becomes invisible, a world that does not require companies to have huge IT departments and hundreds of complex systems to be operated at great financial cost.
But is it even possible to have "No IT"? Well, think of the smart phone in your pocket. It is not that different to a 1980’s Personal Computer, but unlike the PC, your phone is easy to use and the technology doesn’t feel intimidating. Yet your smart phone is simply a tiny PC made easy to use where the technology feels "invisible". You just slip the phone into your pocket and answer it when it rings, whereas a 1980’s PC requires you to connect a large PC to a monitor, boot it up, connect a keyboard and mouse, and read a thick manual just to get started.
At Yazz we believe that corporate IT today is similar to that 1980’s PC. To use IT in a large company requires understanding cloud, servers, Devops, and a huge IT expenditure on hardware and support staff. We believe that this will change, and eventually, just like the PC, the IT and support department will get cheaper and fade into the background to become invisible. Your company will still be creating new automated systems, it is just that they won’t be calling them IT systems anymore, and they won’t need IT departments to build these systems.
So where does VisualJS fit into this "No IT" vision. Well, maybe it makes sense to understand the history of the product first. The creator of VisualJS, Zubair Quraishi first thought about building a web based development tool since he was at University where he built a Hypercard style development tool called OpenPage (using C++ on Solaris) as his final year Computer Science project at Manchester University. The second version was written in Java, but this didn’t go anywhere. The third version was developed in Javascript, Ruby and Sinatra in 2007, but was too simplistic. Also, in 2008 a fourth attempt was made in Erlang. A fifth attempt was built a Clojure/Clojurescript based tool called Clojure on Coils, which the author thought was pretty cool since it has front end SQL and a time travelling debugger, but most people in the community thought that it was a joke. Eventually after a couple of years the founder outsourced the problem by investing in a project by Chris Granger and Rob Attori, called LightTable/Eve. They tried to solve the problem of building a usable development system until 2018.
After 2018 the founder took a step back and realised that he had a lot of knowledge about the subject, but needed to find a way to build something that can be commercially viable, as this is a problem that 10,000s of companies have tackled unsuccessfully (just pick up a 1980s edition of Personal Computer to see many companies attempting the same thing). So for a seventh attempt, the author tried to create a tool for enterprise users to build small webapps which can integrate with other systems, based on the look and feel of Visual Basic 6. The product is called VisualJS, and has a simple VB style editor, and allows you to build GUI apps, and micro-services. It uses a simple component model based on a single Javascript function per component, for both server side and front end components. It uses NodeJS, SQLite, and VueJS. It can also run as an Electron desktop app. It can run on Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift.
Chapter 1
Introduction
This guide aims to be a comprehensive look at the VisualJS product and the surrounding ecosystem.
What is VisualJS?
VisualJS is a tool for building internal business applications. It has a drag and drop UI builder and uses Javascript as a scripting language. In some ways VisualJS can be thought of as a very lightweight version of Visual Basic. A few points of compariston to Visual Basic are:
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Visual Basic runs only on Windows whereas VisualJS is multi-platform
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Visual Basic is a proprietary product whereas VisualJS is open source
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Visual Basic uses basic as a scripting language whereas VisualJS uses Javascript
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VisualJS lacks the module system of Visual Basic
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Visual Basic applications compile to a .exe whereas VisualJS apps are distributed as a HTML file or as the VisualJS he run time plus a .vjs file
What can VisualJS be used for?
VisualJS can be used for many applications:
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Small internal business apps
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Dashboards for monitoring systems
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Data imports from MS Access or Excel
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Visualisations of complex environments
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Small microservices
However, VisualJS would be terrible for:
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Writing an operating system
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Writing low level device drivers
Who is VisualJS for?
VisualJS can be used by many people since it has a drag and drop user interface. However, when you need to do something slightly more complex you will need to drop into the code editor which uses JavaScript as a language. This means that while VisualJS is not as easy to use as Excel, it is not as complex as a full-blown programming language.
What is the future of VisualJS?
The future of VisualJS is that it could be used for a lot of different applications, but one that we are very passionate about is medical diagnosis, as computers get smaller and smaller every year VisualJS can be run eventually on tiny dust sized devices which would have sensors and cameras which could connect navigate in the human body and the bloodstream. This could play an important part in early medical diagnosis and eventually microscopic surgery too.
Chapter 2
The Low Code Landscape
Before you start choosing tools to move forward with on your low code journey you need to understand the low code landscape
The categories
There are many categories, both tech and process:
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No code
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Low code
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Devops
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Traditional languages
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Excel
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SAAS
The players
There are many alternatives to VisualJS, but they must be divided into categories:
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No code
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Low code
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Devops
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Traditional languages
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Excel
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SAAS
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Other
No code
Lazarus https://www.lazarus-ide.org
Low code
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Xojo
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Mendix
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Outsystems
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Microsoft Access
Paid SAAS products
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Retool - https://www.retool.io
Devops
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Kubernetes
Traditional languages
Excel
SAAS
Other
Oracle Apex
Oracle Apex has been around for about 20 years and even though it’s not so well known is actually very powerful tool it’s a web-based drag and drop application builder which runs on top of the Oracle database. One of the unique things is that it is written in PLsql which is Oracle version of SQL. It is used a lot in many Enterprise companies but it isn’t very well known.