Hey!<p>I'm thinking of building a no-code framework. The idea is a bit crazy and I'd love to hear your thoughts.<p>The goal is simple: to make it easy to embed visual web builder into any web product. Actually it doesn't have to be limited to pages, you could edit single components, parts of pages, etc. So it's kind of like WYSIWYG text editors (TineMCE, CKEditor) but for web layouts.<p>But I don't like the idea of general-purpose builder that is based around HTML/CSS (like Webflow). I feel it'd be just too hard for most people to use, there's no abstraction. Look at Squarespace - each block has limited amount of styling options and it makes it foolproof and user-friendly.<p>That's where the framework part comes in.<p>What if instead of having a general-purpose editor you had both editor AND the framework? With framework you could use code to build your own "no-code components". No-code component would be a React component but with some extra properties that define its visual editability in the editor (fields, slots for subcomponents, styles calculation etc)? And editor would know how to handle no-code components and provide all complex editor logic out of the box (drag&drop, collaboration, history, basic fields, etc). I see it as a true visual building primitive for web.<p>This architecture would allow developers to build their own simple and highly themeable Squarespace-like blocks. Blocks could be open source. Interoperable between implementations, etc. Blocks could have different levels of simplicity. Could be for advanced users and for less advanced users, etc. And each product team could make their own decision which components are allowed.<p>What do you think?
Microsoft had something really special with Visual Basic back in the 1990s, nothing has come close to it ever since, including Visual Basic.NET.<p>React-like frameworks seem to be a good basis for no-code and it seems that no-code could tame the complexity of coding for such a framework.<p>Such a system also needs a matching back end (otherwise it is just a 50%-code framework.)<p>A few years back I was exploring the possibility of “low-code” frameworks that include a semantic modeling component. That is, the system comes with prebuilt data models for common business cases so that “developers” don’t kneecap themselves by picking a bad data model.<p>Fred Brooks wrote this article<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Silver_Bullet</a><p>where he says that there are several (say five) stages in software development and a technical innovation that reduces the effort of one of those to zero still leaves the other 4/5. The way <i>around</i> that is <i>through</i> that, which is that a revolutionary no-code product needs to address <i>all</i> the work that goes into the product. If you just pick a certain subset of the problem to solve you are a bridesmaid and not a bride.<p>Look me up my profile and I’ll show you some of my slides from that period.
That sounds like Plasmic: <a href="https://plasmic.app" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://plasmic.app</a><p>You register React components as building blocks, and compose them together into websites and web apps.