Does any have experience with app development platforms such as Goodbarber app builder? Which frameworks and languages are used to run those kinds of machines? is that easily doable to build a platform like that?
Doesn’t matter, could be any language. If there’s a web interface that’ll be JS, but that’s the same for any web app so doesn’t really mean anything.
The apps are constructed from a template, so the application lets you tweak variables in the template, then writes those templates. iOS app template is ObjC rather than Swift so assuming they’re using something they’ve had for a very long time, similarly Android template is just Java. PWA will be React I assume, but could be Angular or Vue (or something else, but assuming one of those).
PWA is useful because it’s easier to make a live editing interface using web technology. So can load the PWA template & allow a user to tweak the variables and show a live representation pretty easily, iOS/Android apps can simply have same design as that. I don’t know if that’s what they’re doing here, but it would seem sensible & explain why they offer the specific things they offer.
No, it’s nightmarishly difficult, it is an application that has to build applications. It needs the outer application built. Then the inner application has to be also a normal application. Except everything in it has to be modifiable and conditional and generalised instead of being specific. And there needs to be a way to turn the inner model of an application into a real application. Most platforms do what this one does and have a single template, but that alone is exceptionally hard to build and maintain. As a rule, most of these things are a huge mess and don’t work very well, normally a huge ball of crap code that generates crap code, but 
Edit so app is any language. It needs to be able to store variables for the template in a database. It probably needs to render a web frontend using those variables that shows a version of the PWA (and allows modification of said PWA via some editing tools). There are a set of templates (web, iOS, Android). Takes the variables, writes the templates somewhere using them. Those templates get dumped into an iOS/Android/Web project folders. Each project folder uses XCode CLI tools/Android CLI tools/Node CLI tools on a build server somewhere to create the output. Customer can probably D/L the output files for the web stuff, possibly the Android app, then the app builder company themselves submit the iOS & Android stuff to the respective stores.
The reason it’s in any language is you can do the above in any language (the build stuff will be done using language-specific tooling, but that’s an implementation detail and they’ll likely just be paying a CI provider that already has the build server infrastructure set up).
Just wanted to give this sentence it’s own like 
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 182 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.