Always wanted to do a recap from the perspective of how Wappler updates affect our dev shop (slashash.co) and the features we use. This is based on George’s year-in-review points.
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Improved UI for server actions. The cleaner steps, with improved comments towards the end of the year, make our long and complex server actions a bit easier to work with.
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Meta data and picker improvements. This has been building upon gradually over the years, and this year too there were improvements around how schema is saved and presented on both client and server side pickers. Made the UI more usable.
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Project assets and extension update flow. This was sort of a surprise because I wasn’t sure how this would be implemented on Wappler’s end. But with a few iterations, it works quite well in current state. Only drawback is repeat update prompts due to linefeed mismatch in Windows.
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Tagify. Only started using this in the past couple of months, but the UX has been good. There are few issues (probably haven’t reported), but a really good select2 alternate definitely and it is Wappler native.
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Native windows and dialogs. This is something which did not make much of a difference in terms that the dialogs still don’t have full keyboard support and the UX is unusable when navigating using keyboard.
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New Wappler brand identity. Even though the community feedback was a mixed-bag, have gotten used to the new design, colours and subtle animations. Overall, not bad.
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Breaking changes. A slight change in the way steps are executed caused a huge rework of code on our end. And the latest one relating to DB time zone handling, which was thankfully well handled, had us worried. We don’t mind breaking changes, just a clear and timely communication around it should be implemented.
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ENV support. This has been really great for overall project development. Our use cases for environment based project settings were easily handled with improved support. There are still UIs which are missing this, but hopefully they will be improved in future.
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Stripe and others. We finally had a chance to integrate Wappler’s built-in Stripe component. Although it requires reading Stripe’s docs, it works quite well. Wappler’s doc can be improved, for eg: distinguish between using checkout form and Stripe checkout. We also used client side S3 upload, Tagify and Bootbox. We built more extensions and updated older ones too.
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App Connect improvements. This was the biggest improvement for us. A couple of years ago, Patrick had improved app connect with huge visible improvements. And this year again, there was a good speed boost with the update.
Roadmap: Hadn’t posted my personal views on the roadmap since I could only relate to a few App Connect and Server Connect improvements that would be useful to us. Rest of it, not so much.
I rather prefer Jonas’s list to be the roadmap for 2023 (short term) which he shared after the release of version 5.
An alternate roadmap: Take the year off from new features, clean up old posts and bug reports in community, release only bug fixes. Change focus to build a new documentation system that can keep up with Wappler’s weekly releases. With that, also restart documentation from scratch. Archive all current content. There are numerous input fields and events and attributes and other things that are not explained. A document explicitly explaining every single input field and button with every possible variation^ should be built. This could also lead to cleanup of extra options. Not sure if this would work out financially for Wappler though.
A big thanks to all the community members and the Wappler team for helping us out over the year. Its the backbone of Wappler.
As of end of 2022, Wappler remains king of low-code tools offering great flexibility, power and time & cost saving. Thank you for all the improvements in 2022. Hope 2023 is just as stable and cool.
(^Variations within a component or when used with other components, not its real-life use cases)
Team /#
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