Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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The company I work for is implementing our own hosted OutSystems “factory” and is beginning to tackle replacing a bunch of legacy (really ancient) business apps and end-user developed solutions (e.g., Microsoft Access) .
I’ve taken a few weeks of training on it so far, and it seems pretty interesting. It creates React web apps as output, so there is a lot of Javascript and CSS tweaking that can be done in addition to the RAD development environment to create some nice applications. You can get pretty deep into creating web and mobile native apps, but we’ll probably try to stick with React web apps that will work on mobile screen sizes as well, just to keep the complexity down.
It is pretty interesting how their “factory” handles the publishing of apps to multiple environments (dev, test, prod). We’ll see how it all works out in practice once we get rolling.
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That sounds interesting. How does it ‘spit out’ the applications? Does it analyze Data models and UI forms metadata to produce something? You have me interested now. 
Charles and I have collaborated on this computer vision feature recently. Combing form definition generation based on just a picture you drew: https://youtu.be/_alogJoQbVo?t=125
The RAD IDE let’s you build the UI, data layer access, and code flows. Then when you publish your app it builds the HTML and React JS code that is actually executed by the browser. It works reasonably well for basic applications. You can dive deeper and add extra Javascript and CSS tweaking to perform more complicated tasks.
Their “factory” handles the building of your dev/test/prod environments, supposedly automating the devops processes. I haven’t played around with that yet. We’re still building our internally hosted version (in AWS), but you can also use the vendor hosted environment.
It has a bit of a learning curve around their proprietary stuff, but if you come from a web frontend developer background (JS, React) it might be a good fit.
They do allow you to setup a free dev environment to experiment with it. So, it’s worth checking out - https://www.outsystems.com/