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 Visual Javascript fit into this "No IT" vision. Well, maybe it makes sense to understand the history of the product first. The creator of Visual Javascript, 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 Visual Javascript, 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.

This guide aims to be a comprehensive look at the Visual Javascript product and the surrounding ecosystem.

Visual Javascript 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 Visual Javascript can be thought of as a very lightweight version of Visual Basic. A few points of compariston to Visual Basic are:

Visual Javascript can be used for many applications:

However, Visual Javascript would be terrible for:

Visual JavaScript 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 Visual Javascript is not as easy to use as Excel, it is not as complex as a full-blown programming language.

The future of Visual JavaScript 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 Visual JavaScript 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.

Before you start choosing tools to move forward with on your low code journey you need to understand the low code landscape

There are many categories, both tech and process:

There are many alternatives to Visual Javascript, but they must be divided into categories: