I’m using airtable as a backend for now and plan to migrate to either Xano or Supabase. One of the key problems that we have is that there does not seem to be a way to create a development environment where we can make changes to the backend and frontend, test it out and then push to a live application. I don’t know how to do this without copying my airtable base and then breaking all the links that I have in my app. I’d have to go through and re-link everything which would take hours.
Is this an oversight? Am I missing something? Other then a demo app, how can you use airtable as a backend without this key functionality?
If I can figure out how to keep my app running while I make changes we can keep using airtable and take a bit more time to develop out a proper backend while our MVP is running. If this is a key flaw, I think its something that people should be warned about, and we are going to have to rush to migrate to a better backend.
Unfortunately, I think if you go with Airtable, you’ll need to make it work with a copy of your base as you described. As far as I’m aware, Airtable doesn’t offer the possibility to work with a staging environment.
That’s what I thought. This is one of my issues with the no-code rmovement. There is all this information out there, but little about some of the key limitations. It’s all about how no-code is just as scalable as code.
I would say that is a deal breaker. Not having a staging environment is the opposite of moving quickly and being agile. It’s an operational nightmare.
It would be great for WeWeb to take a different stance and talk honestly about some of the limitations of these different platforms, and of no code in general.
There are all these tutorials about what you can create, but without a staging environment can you really create and maintain an app? How does that work?
That’s is what’s attracted me to WeWeb it’s code friendly. I can type in JavaScript anywhere I want. NPM support is also a big plus. .
Ultimately, our primary mission is to provide a great tool to build no-code frontends that scale. We do our best to educate no-coders along the way to help people choose the right stack for their use case (even when it means moving away from WeWeb!), but there’s only so much we can do with 24 hours in a day
Love the idea of creating a mini-course about best practices to maintain and debug an app once it’s live though. I’ll add it to the list! It wasn’t on my radar for some reason but we’ve been having more and more questions along those lines during Office Hours. Thanks for the suggestion!
I appreciate the general approach WeWeb is taking, its much more code friendly and straightforward. These warnings are great and so is the Securtiy 101 video.
A general video about some of the differences between the no-code backend platforms would be great. There is so much bad info out there.
My fustration is more at the community of no-code “experts / consultants” that have become evangelist and promoters. Maybe thats just a factor of the influencer economy and commercial nature of no-code. Traditional sources of information like academia, books, papers, github, independent organizations and forums like StackOverflow don’t apply.
Since frameworks like React and Vue are free and open source no one is getting paid to put together promotional youtube infomercials. The information out there is more objective and battle tested.
BubbleCon (Bubble’s “conference”) is like going to a multi-leveling marketing event. A react.js conference is mostly builders talking about best practices and other technical topics.
I think there is definetly a place for a less marketing heavy no-code tool out there, and a no-code tool that also embraces the power of code. I think that will result in a much richer community base and a better product.
