No-code application platform

This was the plan all along

This is not a change in direction, this has always been the goal of Boomla. We wanted to start with building a website builder because building an application platform felt like an impossibly big undertaking and the foundations of the application platform and the website builder seemed to be very much alike. A web application is basically a website after all, one that is rich in capabilities. In fact, I called web applications "websites" for way too long. Turns out the market means something too simplistic by the phrase "website" so I gave in.

What is changing

Strong type system. Our storage engine which we call the Boomla Filesystem is getting a strong type system. This is required to store large amounts of structured data.

For anyone new here, let me clarify that the Boomla Filesystem is a filesystem and database at the same time. (A database is essentially just a software for storing data in a structured form.)

Passing around data. For now Boomla has been focused on rendering objects in the structure they were stored in on the Filesystem. You could create a gallery by creating a gallery object and placing images in it. That works really well, but if you want to create a higher level reusable card component where you want to pass in the images as a parameter, you are out of luck.

To build highly composable feature-rich applications, we need to pass around data.

Low level building blocks. Low level HTML building blocks like div-s have only been available in code. They are coming to the no-code Editor. This will allow you to create any user interface without code.

Flow control primitives. You will be able to control the execution flow without writing code. Think of an if statement, that will only show elements if a certain condition is met, or an each statement for iterating on a list of elements.

Actions. You will be able to change data (create, modify, delete objects), send emails or schedule jobs to run at certain times - all built on a no-code user interface.

Reactive view. Keeping the user interface up-to-date with changes to the underlying data is really really hard and time-consuming. Boomla will support reactive updates, meaning that changes to the underlying data will be automatically reflected in visitor's browsers.

Join the private beta

If you want to be among the first to use the new capabilities of the platform and shape its direction, please get in touch with me!