Low code development options.

[zhill29]

Hello all, new here partially due to Reddit's recent decisions.

 

I'm a systems admin on a very small IT team, no developers in house. We've outsourced a lot of our development needs in the past. I would like to tackle some of the basic things in house, things we want at the moment are web apps for purchase requests and quality control checklists. I could accomplish both with Microsoft Power Apps and Sharepoint but I need to host it in house and would rather not have to pay M$ licensing for people that need to use them from a tablet that don't already have O365 accounts.

 

I'm curious if anyone here has experience with any low code development platforms that would let me host my apps myself without paying per user license fees?

 

 

[wasab]

it really depends on what you wanna build. low code, no code platform are majority for websites 

[Franck]

Just turn on IIS on any version of Windows Pro or Windows Server and host yourself with a 10 min tutorial.

 

 

Then just use your IT skills and invent a dns name that you put in your router and redirect to that PC and block from the outside so it's only intranet.

[TheStarkster90]

Your best bet is to either use Django (Python) or Spring Boot (Java) with their built-in templating tools while using Bootstrap or Fomantic UI to reduce a lot of the CSS work you would need to do.

 

A lot of low-code platforms are going to be cloud-based and charge as such. In my experience with MuleSoft, the utility doesn't live up to the marketing. There are a many things with MuleSoft I would've rather done with Django or (since my employer is a Java shop) Spring Boot since the debug tooling for those platforms is miles ahead.

[Guest]

On 6/29/2023 at 2:19 PM, zhill29 said:

a tablet

If these are android based...

or you put android emulators on your tablets...

 

"App Inventor"

https://appinventor.mit.edu/

That's pretty good.

 

I think Scratch might also be able to compile? I'm not sure.

[ChickenTick]

On 6/29/2023 at 7:19 PM, zhill29 said:

I'm curious if anyone here has experience with any low code development platforms that would let me host my apps myself without paying per user license fees?

 

 

 

Bit of a janky solution to a similar issue (but it was the cheapest and quickest (and dirtiest)).

 

We didn't have a budget (so we spent 100$ ish)

We already had a web portal so we made a set of Android and iPhone apps on a no-code website that were just a viewer of the website.

We tried Appgyer but that got eaten up by SAP and for some reason, I couldn't log on after that. Ended up using Bubble.io and Appymakr trials.

Then sent the APKs and AABs to warehouse staff so they can use them on ipads etc. I have no idea how well it worked (I doubt it was the nicest solution) but there was no-way the inventory system the website was pointing at was getting re-platformed.