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Bubble + Blockspring — Build web applications, with your data, without code
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@bentossell Bubble is about empowering people to build apps themselves, while @trygigster is more of an outsourcing model, which is quite different. We think that if the process becomes easy enough, it's much better to build apps yourself, because you very often have lost in translation issues with the devs. Curious to see how Gigster will solve that issues.
That's similar to Excel 20 years ago. Today, nobody hires an outsourcing shop to build an Excel sheet. In many ways though, it's like an application. It's just that Excel made it easy enough for people to do it themselves after a few hours of learning.
What Blockspring brings to the table is ability to connect to any data source, in particular internal datasources (in large organizations) without having to code anything. They did it for Excel, now Bubble lets people build apps with any source of existing data, without technical skills.
@estraschnov definitely interested to see this space evolve and as you said... I wonder if it becomes easy enough, will people just build themselves or outsource.
I think there will always be a market for both and I think Bubble is such an amazing company in the space. Congrats :)
@bentossell Great questions. In short - some people are builders, others aren't. I think it's how we're wired and the world needs both types. We're making it easier for those that want to build products, to do so.
We've all worked on teams with people that get amped, and can make the time, to figure tech out themselves. Whether it's the marketer teaching themselves SQL, the recruiter learning how to scrape sites with import.io, or the salesperson learning how to lookup people's email address with Chrome extensions. They're people that want to be builders, but not developers. This integration is for them. The technical marketers, the people hacking sales, hacking sourcing, hacking ecommerce, etc. They can be builders too.
Many people don't care or have the time. You dont need to be a technical marketer to be a marketer. But in the not too distant future you may see your tech-savvy teammates, not just developers, building your products :). And I have a feeling that means better products. A technical marketer might know much better what a marketer wants than an engineer. And that also means a bigger army for @trygigster. I don't see them and Bubble as competitors at all.
@estraschnov and Josh have done a brilliant job with Bubble. Excited to bring the world's APIs into the mix w/ Blockspring. Lots more in store for helping the next generation of builders do their thang!
@pavtalk yeah I think its a great platform and something I would be trying to use if I wasn't working at PH.
I could never get into coding and always struggled on the technical side, so was looking for something like this.
Luckily I found @mubashariqbal to help me on the technical side but maybe if I get any time to do another side project I'll be coming to this straight away to test it out!
Love, love, love this!! Just built myself a slack invite app!! Whoop!! :-) Empowerment at it's finest!
Can you guys add a way to simply upload excel or csv files? Copy and pasting my data from Excel is a formatting nightmare. Even better - can you let me connect an external SQL database?
@averyhaskell We'll add that soon, but it shouldn't be too bad copying and pasting csv data, is it? Connecting with an SQL backend is precisely what you could do with Blockspring :) You can write your own block and use it as a data source / writing action.
And the real fun -- I mean epic productivity really I do -- begins today. Can't wait to experiment with this for 8-12 hours. Send pizza.
Love this trend of helping less-technical folks build rich apps (see motion.ai). Who do you see as the major competitors to bubble+boxspring? What about bowtie.io, which launched on here a couple days ago?
@afhill from what I see from boxtie, it seems more for developers, and I don't think they focus on web apps, but more static sites. But the overall idea is similar: making creating things easier.
Amazing. When are you going to build a feature that uses speech-to-creation so that I can program with my imagination and my voice (That is something I would definitely pay for)!
We'll add that soon, but it shouldn't be too bad copying and pasting csv data, is it? Connecting with an SQL backend is precisely what you could do with Blockspring :) You can write your own block and use it as a data source / writing action.
Hello everyone,
I'm Emmanuel, cofounder of Bubble. It's great to be back here :-)
Today, we're exciting to announce, together with Blockspring, our integration. By integrating our both products, we enable non technical people to build web apps with their any source of data, either from third party services or from your internal back end, without writing any code.
Software is all about the data. So as part of making software development simple, we think connecting your Bubble app to your source of data — whether that’s an external API like Twitter, or your own database — should be as easy as clicking a button.
This integration lets you add any source of data to your Bubble app. You start by adding the Blockspring plugin in your Bubble app, then authenticate with Blockspring, and can start adding blocks to your apps. You can even code your own, and have custom code run in a code-less app :)
You can see some examples of what can be built with blocks. Searching Product Hunt and tweeting the poster, getting a word cloud of wikipedia articles, anything is possible, without any code.
We'd love to hear your thoughts, and will be here to answer questions! Thanks for your support!!!
Bubble (+ Blockspring) could be quite interesting to our Valentina Server customers. Ill send you a quick note through your web form to follow up.
I love Blockspring but haven't yet spent enough time playing with Bubble. This looks amazing - can't wait to try it!
I have nothing but good things to say about Bubble!
I'm a non-technical founder & I continue to be able to validate my ideas on Bubble. I used it to start bringing in revenue, get into 500 Startups accelerator & also build side-projects for my startup . Just this weekend I launched a new app (www.artcollectingschool.com) in 72 hours (including sleep) using Bubble.
Pumped to check out this Blockspring integration!
Have been playing around seems that for Database solutions its kind of slow - any plans to integrate algolia API
@juergenhoebarth We use elastic search for now, as we don't know the data structure beforehand (since each app is different), but i've been looking at algolia for a while now, we'll probably do something with it soon.
@cprins_ You're right, you define this workflow in the workflow tab, but in execution, we "run" them. That's what we count for pricing. We'll refine the language :)
Is it possible to edit css to make it responsive ? I think it is not responsive at the moment ,.
@umitakcn We're indeed not truly responsive at the moment, but you can design two versions for a page, and we send the relevant one for mobile devices (transparent to the user). We're working on real responsiveness soon though.
Fan of both Bubble and Blockspring! Great to see Emmanuel and Paul partnering up :)
Way to go ! Can't wait to build my first app with it! Bravo @estraschnov :)
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