[PostOnce]

I appreciate the reply and genuinely hope you succeed, but it seems like an uphill battle and a hard sell.

For a trivial CRUD app, the dev can just re-use one they already wrote, no need to learn this layer you've created ... and for a complex CRUD app or something more complicated than that, you're going to need to write real code anyway, so who is the customer?

Why would I as a Python, JavaScript, or Ruby webdev learn your layer, which is at risk of disappearing in a bankruptcy? What will my investment of developer hours look like in 2 years on your platform, if it's still around?

Is it basically only useful for web stuff?

[jmickey]

I believe that you are not the target audience here.

Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

[onion2k]

Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

Only within the set of predefined functionality that can be specified in the dry.io JSON config file. If you want anything outside of that you'll still need a developer. I guess it's possible dry.io will have thousands of components that covers 90% of what each and every app does eventually, but until then most people who try it will bump up against it's limitations very quickly. The hard part will be keeping them on the platform.

[nickcassimatis]

It's a reasonable concern.

Many apps we won't be able to handle at first can easily be handled by our approach with more work.

For some capabilities, we will have ways of filling gaps in the platform. We have some easy-to-use and fairly flexible hooks where you can add a lot of UI customization. We've also discussed mechanisms for catching events in dry and triggering external code developers can write. But that's almost certainly not going to make v1.

[CharlesColeman]

> Isn't the point of dry.io that a business analyst can replace a developer? :)

I've heard that promise before, from BPMS vendors. I don't think it ever pans out, and usually results in a hobbled system that usually still require developers to actually deliver the desired functionality. I think developing software requires a specific mental skillset that can't be replaced by technology, and promises to the contrary are snake oil.

[nickcassimatis]

Every developer I know has a friend or family member who wants them to write some software for them. The friends and family think it will take a few hours, but it really takes us weeks and skills we often don't have. So the software never gets written. Dry is intended to fix that, and so therefore to help developers be more productive.

[jmickey]

In our company, business analysts are relatively technical - they know their way around databases and understand SQL better than most developers. They do create complicated data workflows as ETL jobs, but they are not developers.

Is it a stretch to say that dry.io would enable these people to take on simple development tasks that would be currently done by programmers?

[nickcassimatis]

To do some advanced customization of how an app looks would require some javascript, but if they are happy with the UI we provide by default, then they could build some nontrivial stuff.

[dwd]

Business analysts are generally good at writing system requirements using BDD style syntax.

From that you construct the required model, which is then generated as code.

Getting from a model to code is pretty well covered.

Parsing the business requirements into a model whether via decision trees, or a generative adversarial network is the tricky bit.

[nickcassimatis]

Thanks. We can build more-complex-than-CRUD apps with literally only dozens of lines of code in many cases. You don't need to set up any servers, know any front-end frameworks, configure/index/structure a database, etc. We don't expect anyone to believe that now, just to take a look at it when we release, and perhaps to sign up to test before that.

The reason someone would learn to develop on our platform is because they can build something orders of magnitude faster than they could otherwise.

[nickcassimatis]

Re the risk of us disappearing: if the app someone wants really only takes a few hours or days to build then they might decide (and they can't feasibly build it in any other way) that it's worth the risk. Also, we'll make it easy for users to export their data into a machine-readable format so they can preserve their data independently of us.

At first it will be for web stuff, though we plan to add mobile app capabilities as soon as possible. Think of the space of apps that includes social networks, messengers, bug trackers, CRMs, task managers, etc. That's the kind of thing you'll be able to build at first fairly straightforwardly. Things like self-driving cars, high-frequency trading algorithms, will be beyond our scope for a very long while.

[isaiahg]

You're points are extremely valid. They're not just competing as a platform. They're competing with the standards we work by. If seen a few platforms similar to this, and I think they try to change too much too fast.