Microsoft whips out PowerApps – now your Pointy Haired Boss can write software, too! Microsoft has announced PowerApps, a new way to create and host applications for its Azure cloud service. PowerApps is an "enterprise service for innovators everywhere to connect, create and share business apps," says Application Platform VP Bill Staples. Sure, but what is this really? Microsoft, it turns out, is still …
Access is (was) supposed to be a straightforward way to build apps for data without needing to know code, but every one I've ever encountered built by non-developers has been something of a hash job, needing a knowledgeable developer to get things working right. I kind of expect PowerApps will end up the same way - lots of half-baked attempts needing reworking, then finally being junked in favour of something more robust and usable. The only 'advantage' I can see is that unlike Access with its proprietary hidden code, the interface system is built on known open standards like HTML and Javascript, etc, which might make bits more capable of being reused.
<quote>Sure, if you are a FuseBox developer - make no mistake, before IT managers Executive Damagers have an idea about the difference between Java and JavaScript there must be a half-a-million Billion years pass.</quote>
FTFY!!!
On other topics, I just graduated to a silver badge. How nice!!!
"Access is (was) supposed to be a straightforward way to build apps for data without needing to know code"
But as it was built on an RDBMS unless its users needed to know how to design a database. If they couldn't get that right no amount of code knowledge avoidance was going to help.
My recollection from building a couple of little applications in it was that Access (when I did it, Access 95 probably, if such a thing existed (CBATG)) seemed a bizarre and cruel joke to me in that it was harder to build fairly simple but non trivial form based applications in it than it would be in Visual Basic.
Software-Thru-Pictures (an expensive one that the DoD really liked for just a little while)
I actually don't want to do an inventory of these things that will keep the PHB busy and out of the "Software Engineers" hair.
However SW development shouldn't be so damn fragile and its practitioners shouldn't feel like the shamens of the universe.
Someday, someone will figure out a plug-in system where I can take my peripheral (a lamp?) and stick it into a socket to get power. Or a common communications bus. Or a common way to write specifications.
And there was me thinking I was the only one who could remember that piece of 1980s crud. It wasn't the only one either, the software house I worked for wrote its own after we found out what happened when you clicked the button that said "Don't click this button" or was it a menu option.
Have an upvote.
Might be useful, in the past I've worked places where Access was used to develop something ad hoc which was then used as the basis for requirements etc. if it turned out to be useful. It would most probably be called an agile approach these days. The trick as always is not to allow it to get out of hand.
Might be useful, in the past I've worked places where Access was used to develop something ad hoc which was then used as the basis for requirements etc
The problem is that "ad hoc" often has a nasty habit of becoming "leave it running, it's your job to keep it up". This is why quite a few people I know reverted to the use of mock-up screens only - pure self defence...
Yes, this used to be called Rapid Application Prototyping / Rapid Appication Development and has been re-invented as Aglie. By designing the logic flow with/by the users, not bothering with any specialist IT skills, limited testing, negligible documention, absolutely no version control, systems management or handover an application can be brought into production very quickly and inexpensively, then maintained at great effort, risk and cost for all time thereafter. Dont get me wrong RAD/RAP/Agile have their place, but its a double-edged sword.
Actually, this looks great. The PHBs can build and maintain the shit they want - that generates the meaningless pie charts they love from the unreliable and unverifiable data they demand - and leave the actual important work to the people who know what they're doing. I can see a future where businesses run in a completely smooth two-tier system, where management generate their own software to produce the pointless reports they need to make themselves look good while the people who do the actual work are left to get on with it unhindered. I might actually be tempted back into the industry.
"The problem is that when the PHBs start churning out a few of these easily they will start to question why it takes you so long to get an application delivered."
Already happened to me. A few years before I retired a new PHB entered the company and informed me on day 1 that he didn't see why it took us so long to develop reports, he had seen Microsoft demo a tool that just allowed you to drag and drop data from a database and display it on a website in a couple of minutes.
(A year later he left when the app for which he had been managing the development turned out to have no business logic behind it.)
It may make applications easy to build but they are going to be limited in what they can do and very inefficient. Then the help desk is going to get a bunch of calls wondering why the computer and/or network is slow when the boss is running a bunch of these.
Mind you developers can be very inefficient too. I once had to fix a web application that would take minutes to load because the developer decided to use an O(n^2) algorithm in JavaScript on the browser to combine two sets of data rather than just doing a join in the database.
"Mind you developers can be very inefficient too."
Mmmm. I remember the program that was going to take over 24 hours to load a day's data into the replenishment system. And that was the second effort of that vendor's I had to debug for them. The first just asked the database engine to spawn more & more objects without freeing any or re-using them until it burst.
"I remember the program that was going to take over 24 hours to load a day's data into the replenishment system."
Or, in mainframe batch terms:
"Daily runs for a day, weekly runs for a week, and no one has ever completed an end-of-quarter."
This scenario really happened during a development project back in ~1985.
Yet again a tool to solve the problem of coding being "complicated", which it isn't, to make money from the folks who think it hand this shiny new magic bullet will let them write code magically to solve any problem. That reality of automated development just got even further into the future, since we'll get another decade wasted messing around with this and fixing random dross.
Back in the day - <voice shaking> - we used to call these things 4GLs - (Fourth Generation Languages for those who grew up on Microsoft) - they just created crap code and added very little value. Anyone that could code in C could generate much better code and results.
Can't see these new fangled code generators been much better. Of course if it uses up lots of CPU cycles, network traffic and storage, your average Very Large Cloud Vendor is not going to be displeased to send you a large bill or as they call it "Creating demand"
C'mon Lancelot - time to search for the Holy Grail again
Actually both the examples I gave in another post were coded in 4GL. But that wasn't the problem - exactly the same mistakes could have been made in C. The problem was failing to understand how to use the database engine (which was, of course, written in C). An efficient language is no obstacle to writing inefficient code.
Just what I was going to mention, actually it was:
70s: CASE Tools - going to make programmers redundant any day soon.... (where is IEF or coolgen as it later became these days?)
80s: 4GLs dBase/Foxpro et al so 'power users' can build apps - which sort of worked
90s: RAD tools, anyone (and I mean anyone) could walk into PC world, buy a copy of VB3 and label themselves a 'programmer' and then hash up fucking nightmare apps
00s: code generators and 'scaffolding' gets you somewhere as long as that somewhere looks and acts the same way
Its bad enough seeing most businesses run off a million and one excel spreadsheets which have become 'apps', still it means instead of steaming piles of crap all over the place its all going to be in 'the cloud'
The essential problem isn't that coding is hard; it's that requirements are hard and expressing logic is hard, and mapping requirements to logic is really hard.
We've seen this movie many times before, and it always goes the same way:
Act 1: Our hero releases a tool to let anybody code. People are excited.
Act 2: People start to ask for more capability in the product, because they can't express the things they need to do / reuse the function they created once / find that thing that needs to change because the business rules changed. Our hero reluctantly complies, although he is concerned that the tool is getting big and complex.
Act 3: Our hero wakes up one morning to discover that his tool has become every bit as unwieldy and difficult as a full-blown development environment... because it is.
Coding is mental mapping, real-world challenges to real-world solutions, and when that is done by more than a few data tables and HTML transacts it becomes really exhausting. We are not idiots or stupid - we are just really, really tired. Thanks for posting and making this somewhat obvious!
... isn't this what Microsoft, intel, AMD, Apple, google, ... have been doing for years?
Making IT and digital stuff doable, accessible and workable to the greater populace out there?
No?
EDIT: plus it reads more like Windows PowerToys than Excel macros (or even more like .bat workery)
I wish it was doable.
I admit, it might be profitable to some, but be honest - just how many people are truly enticed to install applications on their micro-powered phone (1MB to spare?!)
Pathetic, and the android space is just as bad if not worse.
I want 1 TB RAM - Period.
I want 1 Petabyte Storage - Period.
Nothing less on any platform by my standards measure up.
Have a great day!
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