12 ms·

Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

603 points by bscanlan 6y ago

jeffbarr 6y ago
More info at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycode-build-web-mobile-apps-without-writing-code/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycod...
- Cilvic 6y ago
  This should be the real post link IMHO
  - dang 6y ago
    Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.honeycode.aws/ https://www.honeycode.aws/.
avolcano 6y ago
Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the space. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. edit: actually going to pull back slightly on this comparison, since apparently Honeycomb is a little closer to something like Access, where there is a database _in_ the app, whereas Retool is built around connecting to an external data source (e.g. a SQL database). This surprised me because I assumed the entire reason you'd want an AWS version of this kind of tool is to integrate with the broader AWS ecosystem, like frictionless hookup to a DynamoDB or whatever. It may have this but just not spotlight it on the marketing pages?
- brd529 6y ago
  My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.
  - darepublic 6y ago
    Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.
  - basch 6y ago
    It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players. Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems. This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings. It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-application-platf https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-... https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-softomotive-to-expand-low-code-robotic-process-automation-capabilities-in-microsoft-power-automate/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof... [1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.
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mg794613 6y ago
Ok honestly, my first thought was "here we go again", BUT when you look at the @jeffbar provided, you can see, that yes, it is "visual" programming. It does however require a certain logical fluency. So I was wrong: It is _not_ the sales/ceo dream of no longer having pesky engineers. It's a proper gateway drug into programming.
- k__ 6y ago
  So, it's more than retool?
- jnwatson 6y ago
  The most common fallacy across almost 40 years of visual programming attempts is that one can somehow escape the essential complexity of a problem domain. One must have "a certain logical fluency" to design essentially any process, regardless of the technology used.
  - jonny_eh 6y ago
    Right, even extreme Excel macros require logic, and is also a programming gateway. The nice thing about Excel (or the article's example of Visicalc) is that one doesn't need to jump into the deep end of logic problem solving, at least at first.
  - trixie_ 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure the zillions of Excel users proves it's not logic that's the problem It's all the scaffolding around it that is the real barrier of entry to most development systems.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago
  Visual Basic?
grouseway 6y ago
Is this the first instance of Amazon offering an end-user (i.e. non developer) SaaS style product?
- rgj 6y ago
  No, there is the Amazon Connect cloud contact center https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
- rpadovani 6y ago
  I think Connect qualify as well: while you can create powerful flows integrating it with Lambda, basic flows are super easy to setup through the UI, just clicking around. https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
- deleted 6y ago
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- cj 6y ago
  Below are a few other AWS services that I'd consider "SaaS style". Lightsail is the only one that has a similar SaaS style pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ - Lightsail (ie. self-hosted wordpress) - Cloud9 (IDE in the cloud) - Workspaces (remote windows/linux desktops) - Workdocs (cloud documents) - Workmail (email) - Chime (audio / video calling)
deanCommie 6y ago
I'm always wary of these kinds of ideas, but honestly this looks pretty cool! I feel like the Press Release[1] actually quantifies why companies would want to use really well. [1] https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/aws-announces-amazon-honeycode https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
alexashka 6y ago
This is like a movie you know 2 minutes in, is going to be a complete disaster, give it another 5 minutes and finally turn it off. You stumble upon it's imbd page some time later to discover it has a 3/10 rating and nobody went to see it. I don't see a single innovative idea in this product and I see plenty that's worse than the experience I had in Dreamweaver in year 2000.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  This looks similar to Airtable, except Airtable UI seems nicer. Airtable is a Billion dollar company, tons of people are happily using it. I am no fan of Amazon, but I do not think it is as bad as you describe. Even if it is half as good as Airtable, this will take off, simply because of Amazon's weight behind it.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - careyrouse 6y ago
    I agree, the users of Airtable love the UI. But it's mostly individuals and small companies. Airtable isn't practical for enterprises with its 50k row limit and extremely limited permissions. With Honeycode being an Amazon tool, I would expect their targets are more enterprise. But even this tool is limited to 100k rows, so until that changes, this can't really be used at scale either. There's still a gap in modern database apps combining scale, granular permissions and something made for non-technical users.
- ako 6y ago
  It doesn't have to be innovative, it needs to be useful. Having this inside the aws ecosystem, is going to be very useful for a lot of people.
  - alexashka 6y ago
    It's about as useful as amazon web services are, for 90% of the companies that are going to get rid of their infrastructure and become completely dependent on amazon for their business to continue functioning. These little creepy 'useful' products are just vendor lock-in, the same way those creepy Internet Explorer-only features were 'useful', and forced the whole goddamn web development industry to complicate their tooling and made testing and providing the same experience across browsers a goddamn nightmare for decades (is it still ongoing? I thankfully escaped hell that is modern web development). I'll probably be on my deathbed by the time these old idiot governments comprehend what these creepy IT companies have been up to since their inception.
amrrs 6y ago
It looks like an Airtable replica to me. I might be wrong. But anyways, AWS getting into no-code (less-code) space is definitely going to impact a lot of small time players. AWS can complete the loop of development to Custom Deployment and It also has bunch of other things in its offerings that anyone would be happy to jump in. I'm just worried about how small-time No-Code players would survive going forward!
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  I'm exploring no-code solutions for some small business tasks. In my experience, if I can find a non-enterprise company to fill my needs, I will be way better off. My past experience with Amazon tools is that they happily stand in the enterprise solutions space, with an unfortunate amount of the baggage that brings along.
- pldr1234 6y ago
  Agreed. At least, I don't see anything (other than visual complexity in their UI/UX) that sets them above Airtable. Good try though.
odiroot 6y ago
My first impression it's like SaaS version of Microsoft Access GUI "apps" (or better said, semi-smart data entry forms).
riskable 6y ago
It's responsive layout Hypercard. We've come full circle. Maybe more like Filemaker Pro, circa 1990.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  I think you are right. You show some of my coworkers GUI built with Qt and they will eww all over it. edit: But this.. it is polished.
t0mas88 6y ago
I'm very eager to see the Office 365 answer to this. Microsoft is the one that needs to come up with a defensive play here, because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large. I'm guessing Microsoft could do a better job than AWS integrating this with Excel and the Office 365 or MS Teams kind of UI to make it feel at home to their users. On the other hand, AWS is ahead now and likely to start integrating this with the rest of their services if it takes off. Either way, I think this can be an interesting development for a lot of half baked Excel processes that are everywhere in a typical company.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Power Apps is Microsoft's version of this. It is actually quite popular.
- justaguyhere 6y ago
  Microsoft can do a much better job than Amazon if they created a competing product. They might take the quicker route and buy AirTable maybe? I can foresee Microsoft and other bigger players entering the no code market seriously in the near future (though one can say Microsoft already has power apps etc).
  - kmnc 6y ago
    Didn't Microsoft just release their Airtable competitor? Lists? Did everyone already forget about that? Seems pretty comparable to this Amazon offering other then the mobile UI WYSIWYG builder. They don't push it as an "app builder" though, more of a web based access that is heavily tied to office/teams.
- tda 6y ago
  It's called Power Apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/
  - basch 6y ago
    The "Power Family" or Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents) are inarguable the most mature bundle of WYSIWYG, visual data flows, and data graphing on the market. It's not just about the app building itself, but all the ways to get data in and out of it, and what else you can do with the data once youve gathered it. Salesforce is probably the other company in the same league. Microsoft clearly has a branding / marketing problem, where people have ignored them for too long, and or are just reconsidering products Microsoft has had on the market for 10 year (another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.) Mirosoft Lists (their Airtable) is a new interface over SharePoint lists. SharePoint lists are one of the data sources for the Power Platform, but so is Dynamics CRM, ERP etc. https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/ https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/
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Edmond 6y ago
As someone working in this space (codesolvent.com)...color me unimpressed so far. Of course with AWS resources this can change with time. They did hype this some months back, I was expecting something a bit more impressive OOTB.
fomojola 6y ago
As an aside: I've been reading the AWS blog posts from Jeff Barr, but ignoring the Amazon Polly audio conversions. I actually listened to it today, and not only is it not terrible, but there's a moment (around 1:05 in or so) where you can actually hear an inhalation! I know @jeffbarr is sometimes in these threads: is that a standard feature of AWS Polly, or is there some preprocessing that is generating SSML to control cadence, and if so how do we get our hands on THAT?
- NathanKP 6y ago
  Breathing is a feature that you can turn on in Amazon Polly since 2018. There are automated, manual, and mixed modes depending on how much you want to manually control the breaths. More info here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-polly-releases-new-ssml-breath-feature/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-po...
- jeffbarr 6y ago
  Thanks for listening to Polly! That's Polly's Matthew voice, there's not special preprocessing, and you can make your own text sound like that.
- tlrobinson 6y ago
  It still sounds very robotic to me. I think Google's WaveNet sounds much more natural: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2 https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2
  - fomojola 6y ago
    There's a personal taste element: I agree with you that certain WaveNet voices sound better (I've actually used them for video narration with some success). The breathing caught me off guard: it took me a minute to identify THAT as the element that was there but I implicitly wasn't expecting to hear. The breathing + pausing at commas/full stops and general cadence was frankly superior to what I've seen with Google Cloud Voice, which is why I was curious if preprocessing was done. I've generally had to do multiple manual passes with Google Cloud Voice to get audio output that didn't sound robotic.
IdiocyInAction 6y ago
Is this really no code? Those formulas they are using look quite a bit like code to me and GUI builders and templates are also nothing new.
andreshb 6y ago
Google would be smart to acquire Glide (https://www.glideapps.com/ https://www.glideapps.com/)
- dataminded 6y ago
  And turn it off 3 months later? :-)
- spderosso 6y ago
  Google acquired AppSheet earlier this year. AppSheet has been around for longer than Glide and it has more clients and features. They already acquired the leader in building apps from spreadsheets.
- dvdsgl 6y ago
  Founder of Glide here! Thank you for the vote of confidence :) We’re quite excited to see the no-code space heat up with Amazon joining the fray.
ZeroCool2u 6y ago
This looks very Tableau-esque. Another tool that takes a similar amount of work to learn compared to just learning programming in the first place, but with more vendor lock-in.
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  Maybe it also serves as a ramp up to learning programming, but along that ramp you can deliver economic value to your audience, rather than completing CS theory exercises. That's often one of the selling points of this kind of product.
odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
I am working on a product in this space. I think pretty much all the 'no code' apps that are coming out have taken the wrong approach to it. No matter what, they are still 'designed' by programmers with a programming mentality. This will lead to a sort of failure as people will feel limited when using it, and a 'non programmer' mentality looks at this and goes wtf? For example: > =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes") I can understand this, 80% of folks here also, but do your mother or father? Or the small business owner down the street? Why is the word `Tasks` in 3 places? What is the "Yes", and so on and on
- themodelplumber 6y ago
  I like what you're saying. Would just add that if my mother and father are the audience, I fear your solution would be unfairly docked a couple stars just for existing online and in software form. They would much prefer that any app exist as the result of a 10-minute phone call. ;-)
  - odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
    Care to explain? I didn't fully understand. You mean they prefer to call someone for 10 minutes and pay them to build the app? Or a recommendation to use an existing app?
    - hnick 6y ago
      I think they mean call a person to have <x> done. Like booking a room or ordering food.
- VRay 6y ago
  Yeah, man, this looks like a beefed-up version of Excel macros Anyone who can write working spreadsheet macros could probably just learn to actually program. Maybe they aren't going to be making the next RTX Voice or proving P=NP, but I'll bet they could crank out some CRUD
  - 6y ago
kords 6y ago
A lot of these things can be done with SharePoint. Same thing, no code.
- llimos 6y ago
  Correct, especially when you add Power Automate and Power Apps - MS have been quietly pulling ahead in this space. They also have one huge advantage that no-one else besides maybe Google have - integration with Office 365: your corporate directory, email, filestore... Which means they don't even need to be the best at this kind of product. Good enough, plus the integration, is a game changer.
  - basch 6y ago
    Office 365 AND Dynamics (CRM, Finance, ERP etc.) The one thing Microsoft really needs still is in house, industry specific layers to drop on top of dynamics, such as https://www.mtwocloud.com/ https://www.mtwocloud.com/ instead of depending on these third parties. Microsofts own sales teams don't know these products exist, and they have poor visibility. Enough companies won't even touch Dynamics, preferring something more industry specific. Look at all the other things they cover in the SalesForce, Adobe, Oracle realm that automatically integrate right into the Power Platform. https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/
    - janstice 6y ago
      Microsoft does have industry accelerators that sit on the Common Data Model & Dynamics, so ISV's (and presumably in-house devs) can write industry-specific solutions that might hopefully play nicely together: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/industry-accelerators https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/industry-...
- draugadrotten 6y ago
  > SharePoint Sharepoint in real life seems to be a very complex product with few people actually knowing it. Out of a company of 10,000 people we probably have 5 guys actually knows anything about sharepoint, Why is it so obscure?
ixtli 6y ago
I focused a bit on the history of computing when i was getting my CS degree and one of the things I've found super interesting is that for at least forty years (perhaps longer!) we've been at least academically interested in writing code "without writing code". It never really works, however for a technical person it can be a great way to do, like, a sketch. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=without+writing+code https://hn.algolia.com/?q=without+writing+code is an interesting search
- lucasverra 6y ago
  im genuinely asking myself if "this time is different". The merging of Cloud + Software consumerism of 15 (ish) years of mobile + software eats world can make the Bubbles, Airtable and other no/low code tools the next long tail revolution of software ? What is different from the front page + Dreamweaver + flash days ? My hint : cloud computing and the hosting of database AND logic in bigcorp maintained garden
  - ilaksh 6y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is. When you say "bubbles" and "software eats the world" I think you are saying that these tools were supposed to replace programming, but so far they haven't. In fact I think that people who make that claim are wrong. Low code development tools have become hysterically successful, especially in recent years. WordPress (400+ million websites) has 50000+ plugins that can do almost anything. Look at Salesforce (17 billion revenue) and PeopleSoft. Airtable (1.1 billion valuation). Shopify is approaching 1 million sites. Wix has $600 million in revenue. There are a lot of other massively successful products that fit into the loose association you gave.
arkitaip 6y ago
It's weird that Amazon releases this low-code tool and yet they can't offer basic managed CMS/Wordpress to millions of businesses out there. Their pricing could start at 20 USD per month and they could conquer the premium (wordpress) hosting market dominated by WP Engine, Kinsta, Media Temple, etc.
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syshum 6y ago
So far I have yet to see a real practical use for no code, they all seem great in the demo's and get alot of hype but at the end of the day they take far more resources to maintain than a normal app and you end up having to have a programmer maintain after the end user quickly exceeds their ability to develop anything in a no code enviroment. They either get Flustered and end up back in Excel, or the "app" gets handed off to IT / Development who get frustrated and start a project to rewrite in a actual programming environment
martythemaniak 6y ago
Funny tangent: I spent my internship (16 months between 3rd and 4th years) building Web 2.0 apps that were essentially implementing flows people were using on top of Word/Excel+Email. It was good work and people were happy to have a nice dedicated web app instead of their clunky flows. After about a year I noticed I was basically doing the same thing over and over again, so I decided to make an app that makes web apps! I could build any app in my app! Awesome! I spent 4th year building this awesome tool out - there was a document editor to create your forms, there was a Visio-like flow editor that could make decisions, take actions (email to that person, fill in that field, send to branch 2 if that checkbox was checked etc). After a few months I eagerly applied to YC (for summer 2007) and... nothing. Turns out I couldn't actually describe wtf I was doing and pg would rather fund Heroku. Good call! Anyway, there were other similar companies back then (Coghead) that went nowhere, but this concept keep on popping up and AirTable seems to have caught on. I guess someone at Amazon got tired of writing the same apps over and over again.
cosmotic 6y ago
Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?
- pmlnr 6y ago
  Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple. frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience. They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.
  - PaulWaldman 6y ago
    Ladder Logic is still used heavily in modern industrial automation systems. This isn't to ease development, but to aid in the supportability by folks who don't have a background in software and are used to reading electrical prints.
- outworlder 6y ago
  > Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is. Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.
- jrockway 6y ago
  It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.) Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.
chrisvalleybay 6y ago
My guess is they are doing that because one of AWSs biggest competitors will be Azure. The Enterprise will be riding on Azure+Power Apps with data sourced from Dynamics et. al.
ciguy 6y ago
I'm getting major Microsoft Access vibes from this. I guess we really have come full circle.
alex_young 6y ago
Sounds a lot like Google App Maker, which is now scheduled for shutdown in January 2021. https://developers.google.com/appmaker https://developers.google.com/appmaker
ilaksh 6y ago
Its weird to me that people in here keep saying this looks like a competitor to [a single specific recent product X] when in fact this type of system has been an entire very popular product category for decades, and there are literally thousands of systems like it. Of course not all of those thousands of systems have become extremely popular or have the same scope or are contemporary. For example: Access, Salesforce, WordPress, Tableau, 10000 other ones that never became really popular including the simple one I made ten years ago for a client. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platfor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programmin... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_developmen...
annoyingnoob 6y ago
This looks like several Microsoft products stacked together, Sharepoint, Forms, Flow, Power Apps. I already do this with Microsoft and most of the time I don't have all of the tools I need or I want to scream at the screen "just show me the code!".
throwawaysea 6y ago
Things are broken when a well resourced large company can just steal someone else's innovative idea (Airtable or others) and try to muscle them out using capital or a captive customer base. We need new anti trust laws.
reilly3000 6y ago
I didn’t see much in the way of docs from the micro site at least. I’m wondering if there is IAM integration or the ability to call Lambdas. Those would be Airtable-killer features from where I sit.
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Yeah, imagine an "app store" for Lambdas that work with this, or just a trend of SaaS companies making their APIs "Honeycode-compatible".
- pldr1234 6y ago
  I think the problem is, it's easy enough to glue to Airtable (lovely API), and the other problem is I'm not sure how you'd generalise the power of Lambdas to a consumer, for whatever this Honeycode thing is.
gdsdfe 6y ago
Interesting ... there's a big push towards this "no code, low code" solutions lately in the industry, I wonder if this is just to sell more cloud services?
cbdumas 6y ago
I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal line of business apps a lot, and most of the time the requirements that they are able to articulate are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions. And by the time you've got enough experience to be able to do that, tools like this just get in the way compared to writing some Python or SQL or C# or what have you.
- unicornfinder 6y ago
  Indeed. The hardest part of my job isn't writing code. It's in understanding the problems and working out how to solve them.
  - dahfizz 6y ago
    That's because you already know how to code. For someone with no programming experience, the programming would be the hard part.
- nickff 6y ago
  I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.
  - grumple 6y ago
    Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.
ivan_ah 6y ago
So, this is like Neonto Native Studio[1] but with less focus on looks and UI, and more on business worflows? I can see how this would be useful for many businesses with rag-tag processes, being able to combine on a easy-to-watch app that everyone has on their phone would be nice. [1] http://neonto.com/nativestudio http://neonto.com/nativestudio
darepublic 6y ago
What we need in this space is basically a UI where you build out what the presentation of the data looks like, what the permissions will be, and then an app gets generated for you automatically. You see the generated product and can then iterate but instead of with devs with tireless coding automatons
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Is it the fourth generation language once again? Quick Master from ICL anyone?
jonplackett 6y ago
The downside... portability. Amazon now own your ass.
fosk 6y ago
Yahoo! Pipes tried this more than a decade ago, it's interesting to see that the dream of "apps my mom could build" never dies. Except most people want to be consumers of applications, not creators. And those who really want to be creators they learn how to code. So, like with Pipes, I am not really sure who is the target audience here. Microsoft Popfly[1] was another one from back in the days. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly
- robbyking 6y ago
  I remember in 2002 when .NET came out they had a tool that turned UML into method stubs with pseudo-code, and I was sure that my career only had a few years left before it was fully automated away.
- pandalicious 6y ago
  "apps my mom could build" kind of describes Excel workbooks. People effectively use excel to build (highly constrained) GUIs for processing data using custom logic that they specify themselves. And excel's popularity speaks for itself, it's completely pervasive. So that's the answer; the audience isn't programmers, it's the officeworkers all over the world currently using Excel to automate office tasks and want a better delivery mechanism than a shared Excel file on the office LAN. That's such a big pie that even capturing a small slice of it might be a reasonably profitable endeavor.
  - miek 6y ago
    You are spot on. I know a ton of people who fit your description. I wish this were higher up the comment stack. So many people are missing this simple viewpoint.
outworlder 6y ago
Give me an intuitive, drag and drop enviroment where I can plan out my AWS deployments and tie resources together, and then write the cloudformation for me. Then I'll be happy. Also, this thing requires a different login even though I'm logged in to an AWS account with corporate SSO. Like quicksight and other tools do, and it's just as infuriating. Just let me start using and bill for usage.
gator-io 6y ago
What's the saying? Code-less environments make 90% of building an app simple, and 10% impossible.
didip 6y ago
I love it for the purpose of building custom internal apps. What would make it better is if: * It’s open source, therefore installable on-prem and free from vendor lock-in. * It has multiple swappable backends. This thing and Bootstrap can replace a myriad of random in-house apps.
kirillzubovsky 6y ago
Using data tables to publish websites and apps is an interesting concept and having an in-house tool to produce most commonly requested ones makes total sense. Look at their templates: Inventory management, Team Tracking, Surveys, Reporting...etc. It makes sense. One hard problem here though, by the looks of it, the tool is a database designed by engineers in response to a lengthy requirements document. It has no regard for user experience, and is one of those things you can use, only if you go through a 3 week training course. This, imo, is where AWS could borrow from startup playbook, and instead of launching a spaceship, start instead with a paper airplane. Imagine if all you could do was to publish an inventory-management tool, that in one-click integrated with Amazon Pay and let the customers buy your products on a website? Maybe Amazon is waiting for someone else to build this on top of their tools, and then make it available, but that poses a question why. Why would someone build on top of Honeycode, only to have Amazon eventually make it their own? Interesting concept, but it's got a long ways to go before anyone needs to be scared of what Amazon can do with this thing.
- kirillzubovsky 6y ago
  p.s. One thing I can't figure out is if Honeycode can function as an API. If I am already using AWS for my other infra, keeping my data inside their "Excel" and then auto process and export it to somewhere using drag-and-drop automation, that makes perfect sense. In fact, the whole "no code" Dreamweaver analogy isn't all that fitting. If they just said "Excel spreadsheet on steroids that integrates with other AWS product," would make more sense, to me at least.
stoavio 6y ago
Too bad this is just another low-code CRUD offering for SMB/Enterprise. This would have been so much more interesting if it allowed me to build an app for mobile and web with a custom domain, database modeling and storage, integration-eque triggers/automations, all while keeping the underlying platform invisible to the user. Instead, I have to create a team on AWS and then invite members who then have to install the Honeycode player on their phones just to use my app. In other words, Bubble needs more competition.
caetris1 6y ago
It's cloud-native Visual Basic.
harrisreynolds 6y ago
Not surprising to see Amazon get in the game with a #nocode tool. I will be interested to compare this with Webase [1] where we've focused first on custom views and the data model but have yet to support custom notifications (coming soon though!). Although the world still needs lots of developers I do believe there is a BIG opportunity in the #nocode space. [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com
pbreit 6y ago
Has anyone ever built a decent app with a tool like this?
deleted 6y ago
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buboard 6y ago
and we're back to MS Access ! about time, really
- glaberficken 6y ago
  Came here to write exactly this, but thought I'd do a quick Ctrl+F first =)
runawaybottle 6y ago
I feel like many of these no-code tools are taking an all or nothing approach that will ultimately ossify into a very specific form. However, if something like Honeycode also had a robust programming/design API, you allow for tons of flexibility. We could build a lot of it without code, and we could build a lot of it with code, and even better, we could code more things that can be built without code on an app by app basis.
nyxtom 6y ago
Really wish Amazon would stop trying to eat all software startups.
pinewurst 6y ago
I see two+ entwined fundamental problems here: 1. Amazon isn't especially known for high quality software. I picture lots of weird corner cases that won't be tested or fixed in their frantic pursuit of new features (which is what's rewarded, like Google if not more so). 2. Sky high Amazon attrition - especially in engineering!* - means that it's always newbies who'll be working on it, under high pressure. I have trouble imagining a non-trivial corporate app with any kind of lifespan living on this thing. *I live in Seattle so any Bezbots can save themselves the denial of harsh reality.
careyrouse 6y ago
Co-Founder of https://www.cloudternal.com https://www.cloudternal.com. I'm really surprised they have a limit of 100k records on their tables. They will have the same issue that Airtable has, it's just not suited for enterprise. We believe there is still a gap in the "database app for non-technical users" space, so we created one that can handle millions of records, provides granular permissions down to the cell level and targets those creative (yet non-developer) users who end up pushing Excel beyond its usefulness.
- sbr464 6y ago
  I agree, I tried to upload a 1 Megabyte sized CSV and was promptly shut down (on the trial tier). In 2020, a floppy disk worth of data is too much?
- nslindtner 6y ago
  Looks awesome FYI: When you try to request early access, I get an SSL error.
  - thomasrognon 6y ago
    Hey there, I set that up. The request early access link is a Google Form so it was an issue somewhere between you and Google. It works for me now, but if it still doesn't work for you, please email Carey personally (email is in his HN profile).
codingdave 6y ago
The comments here strengthen exactly what I was thinking - this is yet another flavor of low-code app development. I see similarities to Salesforce, SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Airtable, and all the other startups on this path that don't seem to realize that they are re-inventing modern versions of products that have been around since the 80s. I spent years in my early career doing Lotus Notes Dev, then shutting down all those apps to go to Sharepoint, then shutting all those down to go to Salesforce. I walked away from that churn about a decade ago to just do SaaS, so I can't truly speak to which of the newcomers has the most promise. But I have yet to see someone take on this market with full knowledge of what came before. I see potential for someone to really learn the in and outs of all such products over the last 30+ years, talk to the folks who have re-done their LOB apps in multiple products over that time, figure out what worked and build a true "best-of-breed" solution. When someone does do that, I'm all in. Until then... the legacy apps I mentioned above are past their time, so pick your favorite flavor from all the new ones.
viksit 6y ago
While I’m always skeptical of no code systems, this is the first one that seems to bring to the web what Visual Basic And Access did for Windows — VBscript, GUI driven layouts and connectors, and eventually the pipeline of programmers who went from VB to VC++ and Java. Amazon also has the Microsoft—esque brand to really drive this into the Zeitgeist. IMO this might be the most game changing product they have launched recently given how much of a business impact it can have if distributed well. But therein also lies its biggest challenge - Amazon hasn’t historically been good at offering their services to the small businesses and consultants that could leverage this and build for the long tail. I wonder if they have a strategy for that.
ricardobeat 6y ago
There is Podio (https://podio.com/ https://podio.com/) in this space which I think is really cool - or it was when I tried many years ago. Always wonder why it is not more popular.
tyingq 6y ago
Google shut down their similar tool: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9682494?p=am_announcement&rd=1 https://support.google.com/a/answer/9682494?p=am_announcemen...
djohnston 6y ago
It seems like a start, but unless they're supporting a community plugin ecosystem you'll be at the mercy of what their team decides is worth integrating. Maybe it doesn't matter.
dennisgorelik 6y ago
Ability to write code - is the main way to deal with application complexity. If Amazon Honeycode does not have that critical feature (ability to write code) - then Amazon Honeycode is useless for creating any complex applications.
julianeon 6y ago
Are there any tools where you can design something in the UI, and then export it as actual React or JavaScript code, that you can then take and upload somewhere else? Using low-code as a developer to iterate faster, and bang out lots of mini code apps quickly, is an interesting idea.
- papito 6y ago
  The idea of code generation is not new - but it seems like the new crop of software developers are learning the same concepts and lessons all over again. Hey - state machines are so hot right now. Back in the day there was this cool concept of creating a bunch of UML diagrams for your business logic and them BOOM - press a button and here is your C++ code. But then architecture astronomy hits the asphalt and you realize that most of the hard work is still ahead. So things like IBM Rational Rose were only sold to suckers.
- mango_indian 6y ago
  I am trying, https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/
rickyplouis 6y ago
These types of tools seem excellent for prototyping, but always fall short in addressing the real world issues of increasing scope and maintainability. No code web development (Wordpress, and Squarespace) has largely thrived due to blogs and largely static content, but I fail to see a similar use case in mobile app development. Maybe it's a lack of imagination, but how valuable is a tool like this outside of todo lists, blogs, and other minor use cases?
ngcc_hk 6y ago
Not for Hongkonger though. Browser work but that is not the point. Is it just USA?
systematical 6y ago
It's a spreadsheet and for when you need more (aka have to write some code), there are conditions, functions etc... https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-functions/90 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-functions/90
kayman 6y ago
In my experience, when people build apps without having to write code, the first iteration is awesome. Get something working and shows great promise. But as complexity grows, the app ends up being a badly designed excel screen on the web.
topicseed 6y ago
This is a great way to prototype some simpler, mostly CRUD-like applications. Definitely not future-proof as new business rules may be hard to add after a while, but by then the PoC has shown its value and ROI, and writing a real app might become a no-brainer anyway.
atulatul 6y ago
This is not related to main content of the post. But when I visit the page on a laptop, a sizeable portion is taken by the header- two or three layers in a div (lb-clearfix m-nav-double-row)- one of which is logo and create account ( blank space between logo and button), then the menu bar (blank space on the right below create account button), then the blog menu and search. In the main section body, a large portion on the right is white space. I have not done UI UX for a few years. Is this a good design? Are there reasons behind it? (views on mobile, etc)
theptip 6y ago
So how do you unit / integration test your code in this paradigm? Or is this just for apps that would otherwise be run from a spreadsheet, and not displacing anything an engineer would build?
TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago
This is basically Microsoft Access forms.
mortonpe 6y ago
Is Honeycode for everyone? Nope. Is it for some people? Sure. I’ve read through countless comments extolling the virtues of hiring python, java, or (insert your favorite language) developer. Let’s not lose sight of the customer. Some problems don’t need a perfect solutions. Some problems need a solution that is more concurrent than excel. Some problems just need a quick solution for now. You would be surprised to learn how many small business run in these imperfect solutions.
hannasm 6y ago
And if if ever gets discontinued you lose everything you might have ever built forever.
brisance 6y ago
Seems like an AirTable/PowerApps competitor, but an early version which means the polish isn't there. Personally I prefer Coda.
wsc981 6y ago
When looking at the website, I do think this could be a very decent product that could fulfil a business need. From what I've seen many businesses use Excel sheets as a sort of apps. And this seems to be a mobile-compatible version of that idea. Of course it'll be very limited, but for a certain niche of business apps it could be very useful as a replacement for Excel.
Illniyar 6y ago
So this is Microsoft Access as a service?
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Looks like it. My first thought was Filemaker Pro or the old Claris Works/AppleWorks Database program.
ezconnect 6y ago
Delphi was my first experience on apps without much coding, it helped me understand event driven programming.
pembrook 6y ago
From the looks of it, I’d say Amazon applied the same level of UX thinking into this as they applied to the AWS admin panel—which is to say, not enough. I think using this in the real world will be about as easy as trying to buy the right phone charger on Amazon.com. People consistently underestimate how long it takes to learn complicated interfaces. At which point you might as well just learn python. Take any advanced 3D modeling software for example. They are visual interfaces, not command line tools, but they might as well be considering the learning curve for the average user. Having visual buttons doesn’t necessarily mean the process of building a 3D model (or a piece of software) is suddenly easy.
ravivyas 6y ago
If you want a new perspective to the entire nocode space, remove the line "building apps" from any conversation or line of thought. A spreadsheet to track a project need not be an app, the ability to temporarily give access to internal data to a non developer team (which become CSVs in email) is not an App. It is this need of building a full solution which actually takes us away from the need of the users to the need to justify a resource for the thing.
pjmlp 6y ago
Looks quite basic versus alternatives like OutSystems.
bram2w 6y ago
A while back Microsoft announced Microsoft Lists, which is a similar tool. Of course there are also existing tools like Airtable, Bubble, Mendix etc. All these tools are great, but they have some downsides in my opinion. - If the product ever gets discontinued you might lose all your work. - All these tools have limits regarding the amount of rows you can store. - If your business depends on such a product and the pricing model changes, it might bankrupt you. - You can't create or download real plugin that integrate well if you are missing features. - In most cases you can't host it at your own servers. - You might end up in a vendor lock-in. These are some of the reasons why I started Baserow. It is an open source alternative to Airtable and in the far future also for tools like Bubble. While it is still in an early phase there is a test version at https://baserow.io https://baserow.io that everyone can try. In the coming weeks you can expect the open source release. Right now, I am finishing up the documentation, examples, plugin boilerplate and some final small changes. After that you can self host it without any limits, vendor lock-in or price changes.
- lukeramsden 6y ago
  Wow, that looks great. An COSS alternative is exactly what this space needs. I wish you great success.
  - bram2w 6y ago
    Thanks! I agree, was surprised to learn that there aren't that many good open source no-code tools out there.
    - zubairq 6y ago
      I couldn't find the source code, where is it on github?
      - bram2w 6y ago
        The open source release will probably happen within 3 weeks from now. It is an early test version that is running on baserow.io, but this is for trying it out only. I still need to write documentation, an openapi spec, a plugin boilerplate and some other small things. When that is finished I will make the code available publicly.
steveharman 6y ago
"Honeycode – Build Web & Mobile Apps Without Writing Code" For the sake of clarity, couldn't they have come up with a name that didn't include the word "code" ?
koliber 6y ago
Is this Amazon's disruption of VisualBasic?
sciprojguy 6y ago
Great. Another ReactNative. Just what we need.
brainwipe 6y ago
These kinds of systems are all well and good if you have a person in your business with an analytical mind enough to pick it up and all your needs will fit the limits of the framework. If your business domain has a feature that doesn't fit then you have a difficult conversation with business people who won't change their process to fit the platform and won't pay to rebuild in a platform that does fit. If you do manage to customise Honeycomb then you're down a path of not really fitting into their model or having to upgrade on their product roadmap, not yours. I've seen SAP and Sharepoint "installations" that have been customised beyond all recognition. Where this will fit nicely is for those internal apps where people are just using Excel or Access-like systems.
bencollier49 6y ago
The looks remarkably like an Access MDB application.
gonesilent 6y ago
Taking the thunder from the coupon code site Honey. Won't be searching for Amazon honey or code and finding real honey. It like doing this with product names.
Aeolun 6y ago
What if I need more than 100k rows per table? Where is the unlimited (enterprise) plan?
dsbanaj 6y ago
This works only for the development of simple applications. If these no-code/low-code platforms want to be considered for serious development, they need to decouple front-end and back-end tiers. A developer can build front-end in one no-code application (e.g Webflow), or Angular/React for slick single-page applications; and the backend in another backend APIs specific no-code application. It will also enable the backend code to be called from native iOS and Android apps.
pradn 6y ago
I don't see Microsoft PowerApps mentioned in the comments. (https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/) It's one of the most significant recent entrants into the "make an app" space. It looks like Powerpoint and its coding is simple, with formulas like Excel. They sell licenses mainly to companies (creating internal app stores).
- DoctorOW 6y ago
  Not sure if this includes Power Automate but I find it really handy for the work I do. If you're not already familiar with how an API works, being able to point and click on an icon to setup automation is great.
zubairq 6y ago
As a developer of an open source low code tool https://github.com/zubairq/pilot https://github.com/zubairq/pilot I think it is great that Amazon has entered this space. It really validates it for the mass market!
MangoCoffee 6y ago
Am I correct to say that we have go down to this road before (no code app)?
shmooth 6y ago
i was hoping for something at least semi-interesting. not so much. airtable, with a google aesthetic. eh. i feel like Anvil is on the right, almost perfect, track -- except for their choice of Python over Javascript. They chose self.Python over javascript. ok. life is full of decisions. in their defense, callbackjavascript is...not so promising. bubble went with..something. right idea. not the best execution. still, a step in the right direction. saw a couple other tools out there that are trying to cross the chasm, but nothing as good as VB yet.
psmithsfhn 6y ago
i was hoping for something at least semi-interesting. not so much. airtable, with a google aesthetic. eh. i feel like Anvil is on the right, almost perfect, track -- except for their choice of Python over Javascript. They chose self.Python over javascript. ok. life is full of decisions. in their defense, callbackjavascript is...not so promising. bubble went with..something. right idea. not the best execution. still, a step in the right direction. saw a couple other tools out there that are trying to cross the chasm, but nothing as good as VB yet.
muddi900 6y ago
>Sharing data across multiple users and multiple spreadsheets is difficult =Importrange() In google sheets.

603 points by bscanlan 6y ago

More info at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycode-build-web-mobile-apps-without-writing-code/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/introducing-amazon-honeycod...

Cilvic 6y ago
This should be the real post link IMHO
- dang 6y ago
  Ok, we'll change to that from https://www.honeycode.aws/ https://www.honeycode.aws/.

avolcano 6y ago

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the space. On the other hand, I absolutely loathe every single UI that has ever come out of AWS, and there is absolutely no chance I give the editor they've built here a shot without hearing lots of positive reactions first. edit: actually going to pull back slightly on this comparison, since apparently Honeycomb is a little closer to something like Access, where there is a database _in_ the app, whereas Retool is built around connecting to an external data source (e.g. a SQL database). This surprised me because I assumed the entire reason you'd want an AWS version of this kind of tool is to integrate with the broader AWS ecosystem, like frictionless hookup to a DynamoDB or whatever. It may have this but just not spotlight it on the marketing pages?

brd529 6y ago
My first glance reads it to be more like airtable or even salesforce at some level, which to your point are the modern iterations of access / filemaker. Drag and drop all-in-one database and application designer that by virtue of being online and multi-user make them way more useful.
- darepublic 6y ago
  Yes my first thought was that this was like Airtable. One of these days one of these no-code solutions is going to actually stick, and I will stop getting paid to basically glue data from different systems together while browsing HN.
- basch 6y ago
  It's a fairly busy territory as it is, with at least 20 major enterprise players. Microsoft PowerApps with PowerAutomate (formerly Flow, their Zapier/IFTTT) have a huge advantage of being bundled right into other licenses. SalesForce and ServiceNow have similar advantages. Quick Base[1] has to be considered the incumbent. Zoho, Oracle. And then the more independent Appian, Betty Blocks, Mendix, OutSystems. This tends to be one space where consolidation and acquisitions aren't as popular, and the big players have built their own home grown products on top of their stacks. (counterpoint, Kony got snatched up by a fintech software services company, Temenos. Apple acquired Workflow which isnt quite the same thing but a tangent space.) In a lot of cases, its going to make way more sense to go with the Vendor that already provides other parts of your infrastructure. If you're an Oracle company, Oracle Apex is going to be simpler, which is the point of all these offerings. It makes a ton of sense for AWS to provide this naively on top of their already mature offerings. It's also not a space I'd want to enter as an independent startup, from scratch, unless you are sure you can actually offer something better and different. Or, instead of a generic offering, your product is tailored to the specific processes and workflows of certain industries. At this point if you want to join this crowd, it would be a safer bet to hitch your ride to a specific tech company lacking this offering (if there is one left) and become so good that they want to acquire you. Or build a specific subfeature in this space, so one of them gobble you up and tack you onto their product (see 3rd link.) I would guess there is still room for some ERPs to be interested in tacking app builders on, like Infor. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-for-enterprise-low-code-application-platf https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3956079/magic-quadrant-... https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://imgur.com/kD5hQ46 https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-softomotive-to-expand-low-code-robotic-process-automation-capabilities-in-microsoft-power-automate/ https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-acquires-sof... [1] Somewhat shocked to not see Quick Base mentioned even once in this thread. It's a billion dollar company thats been offering this nonstop for 20 years, and is still relevant.

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mg794613 6y ago

Ok honestly, my first thought was "here we go again", BUT when you look at the @jeffbar provided, you can see, that yes, it is "visual" programming. It does however require a certain logical fluency. So I was wrong: It is _not_ the sales/ceo dream of no longer having pesky engineers. It's a proper gateway drug into programming.

k__ 6y ago
So, it's more than retool?
jnwatson 6y ago
The most common fallacy across almost 40 years of visual programming attempts is that one can somehow escape the essential complexity of a problem domain. One must have "a certain logical fluency" to design essentially any process, regardless of the technology used.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  Right, even extreme Excel macros require logic, and is also a programming gateway. The nice thing about Excel (or the article's example of Visicalc) is that one doesn't need to jump into the deep end of logic problem solving, at least at first.
- trixie_ 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure the zillions of Excel users proves it's not logic that's the problem It's all the scaffolding around it that is the real barrier of entry to most development systems.
MangoCoffee 6y ago
Visual Basic?

grouseway 6y ago

Is this the first instance of Amazon offering an end-user (i.e. non developer) SaaS style product?

rgj 6y ago
No, there is the Amazon Connect cloud contact center https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
rpadovani 6y ago
I think Connect qualify as well: while you can create powerful flows integrating it with Lambda, basic flows are super easy to setup through the UI, just clicking around. https://aws.amazon.com/connect/ https://aws.amazon.com/connect/
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cj 6y ago
Below are a few other AWS services that I'd consider "SaaS style". Lightsail is the only one that has a similar SaaS style pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/pricing/ - Lightsail (ie. self-hosted wordpress) - Cloud9 (IDE in the cloud) - Workspaces (remote windows/linux desktops) - Workdocs (cloud documents) - Workmail (email) - Chime (audio / video calling)

deanCommie 6y ago

I'm always wary of these kinds of ideas, but honestly this looks pretty cool! I feel like the Press Release[1] actually quantifies why companies would want to use really well. [1] https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/aws-announces-amazon-honeycode https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

alexashka 6y ago

This is like a movie you know 2 minutes in, is going to be a complete disaster, give it another 5 minutes and finally turn it off. You stumble upon it's imbd page some time later to discover it has a 3/10 rating and nobody went to see it. I don't see a single innovative idea in this product and I see plenty that's worse than the experience I had in Dreamweaver in year 2000.

justaguyhere 6y ago
This looks similar to Airtable, except Airtable UI seems nicer. Airtable is a Billion dollar company, tons of people are happily using it. I am no fan of Amazon, but I do not think it is as bad as you describe. Even if it is half as good as Airtable, this will take off, simply because of Amazon's weight behind it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- careyrouse 6y ago
  I agree, the users of Airtable love the UI. But it's mostly individuals and small companies. Airtable isn't practical for enterprises with its 50k row limit and extremely limited permissions. With Honeycode being an Amazon tool, I would expect their targets are more enterprise. But even this tool is limited to 100k rows, so until that changes, this can't really be used at scale either. There's still a gap in modern database apps combining scale, granular permissions and something made for non-technical users.
ako 6y ago
It doesn't have to be innovative, it needs to be useful. Having this inside the aws ecosystem, is going to be very useful for a lot of people.
- alexashka 6y ago
  It's about as useful as amazon web services are, for 90% of the companies that are going to get rid of their infrastructure and become completely dependent on amazon for their business to continue functioning. These little creepy 'useful' products are just vendor lock-in, the same way those creepy Internet Explorer-only features were 'useful', and forced the whole goddamn web development industry to complicate their tooling and made testing and providing the same experience across browsers a goddamn nightmare for decades (is it still ongoing? I thankfully escaped hell that is modern web development). I'll probably be on my deathbed by the time these old idiot governments comprehend what these creepy IT companies have been up to since their inception.

amrrs 6y ago

It looks like an Airtable replica to me. I might be wrong. But anyways, AWS getting into no-code (less-code) space is definitely going to impact a lot of small time players. AWS can complete the loop of development to Custom Deployment and It also has bunch of other things in its offerings that anyone would be happy to jump in. I'm just worried about how small-time No-Code players would survive going forward!

themodelplumber 6y ago
I'm exploring no-code solutions for some small business tasks. In my experience, if I can find a non-enterprise company to fill my needs, I will be way better off. My past experience with Amazon tools is that they happily stand in the enterprise solutions space, with an unfortunate amount of the baggage that brings along.
pldr1234 6y ago
Agreed. At least, I don't see anything (other than visual complexity in their UI/UX) that sets them above Airtable. Good try though.

odiroot 6y ago

My first impression it's like SaaS version of Microsoft Access GUI "apps" (or better said, semi-smart data entry forms).

riskable 6y ago

It's responsive layout Hypercard. We've come full circle. Maybe more like Filemaker Pro, circa 1990.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
I think you are right. You show some of my coworkers GUI built with Qt and they will eww all over it. edit: But this.. it is polished.

t0mas88 6y ago

I'm very eager to see the Office 365 answer to this. Microsoft is the one that needs to come up with a defensive play here, because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large. I'm guessing Microsoft could do a better job than AWS integrating this with Excel and the Office 365 or MS Teams kind of UI to make it feel at home to their users. On the other hand, AWS is ahead now and likely to start integrating this with the rest of their services if it takes off. Either way, I think this can be an interesting development for a lot of half baked Excel processes that are everywhere in a typical company.

topkai22 6y ago
Power Apps is Microsoft's version of this. It is actually quite popular.
justaguyhere 6y ago
Microsoft can do a much better job than Amazon if they created a competing product. They might take the quicker route and buy AirTable maybe? I can foresee Microsoft and other bigger players entering the no code market seriously in the near future (though one can say Microsoft already has power apps etc).
- kmnc 6y ago
  Didn't Microsoft just release their Airtable competitor? Lists? Did everyone already forget about that? Seems pretty comparable to this Amazon offering other then the mobile UI WYSIWYG builder. They don't push it as an "app builder" though, more of a web based access that is heavily tied to office/teams.
tda 6y ago
It's called Power Apps https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/
- basch 6y ago
  The "Power Family" or Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerAutomate, PowerBI, Power Virtual Agents) are inarguable the most mature bundle of WYSIWYG, visual data flows, and data graphing on the market. It's not just about the app building itself, but all the ways to get data in and out of it, and what else you can do with the data once youve gathered it. Salesforce is probably the other company in the same league. Microsoft clearly has a branding / marketing problem, where people have ignored them for too long, and or are just reconsidering products Microsoft has had on the market for 10 year (another thread where people said Office on the web has caught up to gdocs, whereas id say theyve been ahead of it for at least 4 years.) Mirosoft Lists (their Airtable) is a new interface over SharePoint lists. SharePoint lists are one of the data sources for the Power Platform, but so is Dynamics CRM, ERP etc. https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/ https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/

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Edmond 6y ago

As someone working in this space (codesolvent.com)...color me unimpressed so far. Of course with AWS resources this can change with time. They did hype this some months back, I was expecting something a bit more impressive OOTB.

fomojola 6y ago

As an aside: I've been reading the AWS blog posts from Jeff Barr, but ignoring the Amazon Polly audio conversions. I actually listened to it today, and not only is it not terrible, but there's a moment (around 1:05 in or so) where you can actually hear an inhalation! I know @jeffbarr is sometimes in these threads: is that a standard feature of AWS Polly, or is there some preprocessing that is generating SSML to control cadence, and if so how do we get our hands on THAT?

NathanKP 6y ago
Breathing is a feature that you can turn on in Amazon Polly since 2018. There are automated, manual, and mixed modes depending on how much you want to manually control the breaths. More info here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-polly-releases-new-ssml-breath-feature/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/03/amazon-po...
jeffbarr 6y ago
Thanks for listening to Polly! That's Polly's Matthew voice, there's not special preprocessing, and you can make your own text sound like that.
tlrobinson 6y ago
It still sounds very robotic to me. I think Google's WaveNet sounds much more natural: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2 https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2
- fomojola 6y ago
  There's a personal taste element: I agree with you that certain WaveNet voices sound better (I've actually used them for video narration with some success). The breathing caught me off guard: it took me a minute to identify THAT as the element that was there but I implicitly wasn't expecting to hear. The breathing + pausing at commas/full stops and general cadence was frankly superior to what I've seen with Google Cloud Voice, which is why I was curious if preprocessing was done. I've generally had to do multiple manual passes with Google Cloud Voice to get audio output that didn't sound robotic.

IdiocyInAction 6y ago

Is this really no code? Those formulas they are using look quite a bit like code to me and GUI builders and templates are also nothing new.

andreshb 6y ago

Google would be smart to acquire Glide (https://www.glideapps.com/ https://www.glideapps.com/)

dataminded 6y ago
And turn it off 3 months later? :-)
spderosso 6y ago
Google acquired AppSheet earlier this year. AppSheet has been around for longer than Glide and it has more clients and features. They already acquired the leader in building apps from spreadsheets.
dvdsgl 6y ago
Founder of Glide here! Thank you for the vote of confidence :) We’re quite excited to see the no-code space heat up with Amazon joining the fray.

ZeroCool2u 6y ago

This looks very Tableau-esque. Another tool that takes a similar amount of work to learn compared to just learning programming in the first place, but with more vendor lock-in.

themodelplumber 6y ago
Maybe it also serves as a ramp up to learning programming, but along that ramp you can deliver economic value to your audience, rather than completing CS theory exercises. That's often one of the selling points of this kind of product.

odshoifsdhfs 6y ago

I am working on a product in this space. I think pretty much all the 'no code' apps that are coming out have taken the wrong approach to it. No matter what, they are still 'designed' by programmers with a programming mentality. This will lead to a sort of failure as people will feel limited when using it, and a 'non programmer' mentality looks at this and goes wtf? For example: > =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]<>% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes") I can understand this, 80% of folks here also, but do your mother or father? Or the small business owner down the street? Why is the word `Tasks` in 3 places? What is the "Yes", and so on and on

themodelplumber 6y ago
I like what you're saying. Would just add that if my mother and father are the audience, I fear your solution would be unfairly docked a couple stars just for existing online and in software form. They would much prefer that any app exist as the result of a 10-minute phone call. ;-)
- odshoifsdhfs 6y ago
  Care to explain? I didn't fully understand. You mean they prefer to call someone for 10 minutes and pay them to build the app? Or a recommendation to use an existing app?
  - hnick 6y ago
    I think they mean call a person to have <x> done. Like booking a room or ordering food.
VRay 6y ago
Yeah, man, this looks like a beefed-up version of Excel macros Anyone who can write working spreadsheet macros could probably just learn to actually program. Maybe they aren't going to be making the next RTX Voice or proving P=NP, but I'll bet they could crank out some CRUD
- 6y ago

kords 6y ago

A lot of these things can be done with SharePoint. Same thing, no code.

llimos 6y ago
Correct, especially when you add Power Automate and Power Apps - MS have been quietly pulling ahead in this space. They also have one huge advantage that no-one else besides maybe Google have - integration with Office 365: your corporate directory, email, filestore... Which means they don't even need to be the best at this kind of product. Good enough, plus the integration, is a game changer.
- basch 6y ago
  Office 365 AND Dynamics (CRM, Finance, ERP etc.) The one thing Microsoft really needs still is in house, industry specific layers to drop on top of dynamics, such as https://www.mtwocloud.com/ https://www.mtwocloud.com/ instead of depending on these third parties. Microsofts own sales teams don't know these products exist, and they have poor visibility. Enough companies won't even touch Dynamics, preferring something more industry specific. Look at all the other things they cover in the SalesForce, Adobe, Oracle realm that automatically integrate right into the Power Platform. https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/
  - janstice 6y ago
    Microsoft does have industry accelerators that sit on the Common Data Model & Dynamics, so ISV's (and presumably in-house devs) can write industry-specific solutions that might hopefully play nicely together: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/industry-accelerators https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/industry-...
draugadrotten 6y ago
> SharePoint Sharepoint in real life seems to be a very complex product with few people actually knowing it. Out of a company of 10,000 people we probably have 5 guys actually knows anything about sharepoint, Why is it so obscure?

ixtli 6y ago

I focused a bit on the history of computing when i was getting my CS degree and one of the things I've found super interesting is that for at least forty years (perhaps longer!) we've been at least academically interested in writing code "without writing code". It never really works, however for a technical person it can be a great way to do, like, a sketch. https://hn.algolia.com/?q=without+writing+code https://hn.algolia.com/?q=without+writing+code is an interesting search

lucasverra 6y ago
im genuinely asking myself if "this time is different". The merging of Cloud + Software consumerism of 15 (ish) years of mobile + software eats world can make the Bubbles, Airtable and other no/low code tools the next long tail revolution of software ? What is different from the front page + Dreamweaver + flash days ? My hint : cloud computing and the hosting of database AND logic in bigcorp maintained garden
- ilaksh 6y ago
  I'm not sure what your point is. When you say "bubbles" and "software eats the world" I think you are saying that these tools were supposed to replace programming, but so far they haven't. In fact I think that people who make that claim are wrong. Low code development tools have become hysterically successful, especially in recent years. WordPress (400+ million websites) has 50000+ plugins that can do almost anything. Look at Salesforce (17 billion revenue) and PeopleSoft. Airtable (1.1 billion valuation). Shopify is approaching 1 million sites. Wix has $600 million in revenue. There are a lot of other massively successful products that fit into the loose association you gave.

arkitaip 6y ago

It's weird that Amazon releases this low-code tool and yet they can't offer basic managed CMS/Wordpress to millions of businesses out there. Their pricing could start at 20 USD per month and they could conquer the premium (wordpress) hosting market dominated by WP Engine, Kinsta, Media Temple, etc.

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syshum 6y ago

So far I have yet to see a real practical use for no code, they all seem great in the demo's and get alot of hype but at the end of the day they take far more resources to maintain than a normal app and you end up having to have a programmer maintain after the end user quickly exceeds their ability to develop anything in a no code enviroment. They either get Flustered and end up back in Excel, or the "app" gets handed off to IT / Development who get frustrated and start a project to rewrite in a actual programming environment

martythemaniak 6y ago

Funny tangent: I spent my internship (16 months between 3rd and 4th years) building Web 2.0 apps that were essentially implementing flows people were using on top of Word/Excel+Email. It was good work and people were happy to have a nice dedicated web app instead of their clunky flows. After about a year I noticed I was basically doing the same thing over and over again, so I decided to make an app that makes web apps! I could build any app in my app! Awesome! I spent 4th year building this awesome tool out - there was a document editor to create your forms, there was a Visio-like flow editor that could make decisions, take actions (email to that person, fill in that field, send to branch 2 if that checkbox was checked etc). After a few months I eagerly applied to YC (for summer 2007) and... nothing. Turns out I couldn't actually describe wtf I was doing and pg would rather fund Heroku. Good call! Anyway, there were other similar companies back then (Coghead) that went nowhere, but this concept keep on popping up and AirTable seems to have caught on. I guess someone at Amazon got tired of writing the same apps over and over again.

cosmotic 6y ago

Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? 27th times the charm?

pmlnr 6y ago
Ladder logic used to be fairly big in PLCs a while ago, but PLCs were rather simple. frontpage98 was the one to kickstart my web experience. They are good to start somewhere from, but they'll never be a replacement.
- PaulWaldman 6y ago
  Ladder Logic is still used heavily in modern industrial automation systems. This isn't to ease development, but to aid in the supportability by folks who don't have a background in software and are used to reading electrical prints.
outworlder 6y ago
> Has programming 'without writing code' ever panned out for anyone? Yes, for everyone, many times. You just have to carefully define what "programming" is. Even when there's initially no "programming", soon things like "macros" will be added.
jrockway 6y ago
It gets you pretty far. When I worked at a bank, most of the pricing was done in Excel. What they had was infrastructure on top of Excel, like standard calculations and network connectivity, to support this. (I ended up writing a monitoring system for this, which proved very interesting. Months were spent going back and forth with the networking vendor about how slow their thing was, but I added some simple time in -> time out monitoring and we found that the cause was actually the spreadsheet. That was a politically unpopular finding, but data is data.) Anyway, this is still "programming", of course. You have inputs, you transform them, and you get outputs. What Excel gives is the ability to see all the intermediate calculations update as you stitch things together, which is very different from the software engineer approach (where we think of all the inputs, and write tests to make sure a particular sub-module works, and then treat that as working forever). The software engineering approach lets us build very large systems reliably, but the spreadsheet approach lets you build simple things very quickly.

chrisvalleybay 6y ago

My guess is they are doing that because one of AWSs biggest competitors will be Azure. The Enterprise will be riding on Azure+Power Apps with data sourced from Dynamics et. al.

ciguy 6y ago

I'm getting major Microsoft Access vibes from this. I guess we really have come full circle.

alex_young 6y ago

Sounds a lot like Google App Maker, which is now scheduled for shutdown in January 2021. https://developers.google.com/appmaker https://developers.google.com/appmaker

ilaksh 6y ago

Its weird to me that people in here keep saying this looks like a competitor to [a single specific recent product X] when in fact this type of system has been an entire very popular product category for decades, and there are literally thousands of systems like it. Of course not all of those thousands of systems have become extremely popular or have the same scope or are contemporary. For example: Access, Salesforce, WordPress, Tableau, 10000 other ones that never became really popular including the simple one I made ten years ago for a client. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platform https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-code_development_platfor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programmin... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_development https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_application_developmen...

annoyingnoob 6y ago

This looks like several Microsoft products stacked together, Sharepoint, Forms, Flow, Power Apps. I already do this with Microsoft and most of the time I don't have all of the tools I need or I want to scream at the screen "just show me the code!".

throwawaysea 6y ago

Things are broken when a well resourced large company can just steal someone else's innovative idea (Airtable or others) and try to muscle them out using capital or a captive customer base. We need new anti trust laws.

reilly3000 6y ago

I didn’t see much in the way of docs from the micro site at least. I’m wondering if there is IAM integration or the ability to call Lambdas. Those would be Airtable-killer features from where I sit.

dane-pgp 6y ago
Yeah, imagine an "app store" for Lambdas that work with this, or just a trend of SaaS companies making their APIs "Honeycode-compatible".
pldr1234 6y ago
I think the problem is, it's easy enough to glue to Airtable (lovely API), and the other problem is I'm not sure how you'd generalise the power of Lambdas to a consumer, for whatever this Honeycode thing is.

gdsdfe 6y ago

Interesting ... there's a big push towards this "no code, low code" solutions lately in the industry, I wonder if this is just to sell more cloud services?

cbdumas 6y ago

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal line of business apps a lot, and most of the time the requirements that they are able to articulate are some variation of vague, ill-specified, and flat out wrong. And it's not their fault at all, it's just that unless you've gone through the process of writing code it's impossible to understand just how pedantic and explicit you need to be when building software versus, say, giving your human colleagues instructions. And by the time you've got enough experience to be able to do that, tools like this just get in the way compared to writing some Python or SQL or C# or what have you.

unicornfinder 6y ago
Indeed. The hardest part of my job isn't writing code. It's in understanding the problems and working out how to solve them.
- dahfizz 6y ago
  That's because you already know how to code. For someone with no programming experience, the programming would be the hard part.
nickff 6y ago
I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.
- grumple 6y ago
  Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

ivan_ah 6y ago

So, this is like Neonto Native Studio[1] but with less focus on looks and UI, and more on business worflows? I can see how this would be useful for many businesses with rag-tag processes, being able to combine on a easy-to-watch app that everyone has on their phone would be nice. [1] http://neonto.com/nativestudio http://neonto.com/nativestudio

darepublic 6y ago

What we need in this space is basically a UI where you build out what the presentation of the data looks like, what the permissions will be, and then an app gets generated for you automatically. You see the generated product and can then iterate but instead of with devs with tireless coding automatons

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Is it the fourth generation language once again? Quick Master from ICL anyone?

jonplackett 6y ago

The downside... portability. Amazon now own your ass.

fosk 6y ago

Yahoo! Pipes tried this more than a decade ago, it's interesting to see that the dream of "apps my mom could build" never dies. Except most people want to be consumers of applications, not creators. And those who really want to be creators they learn how to code. So, like with Pipes, I am not really sure who is the target audience here. Microsoft Popfly[1] was another one from back in the days. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Popfly

robbyking 6y ago
I remember in 2002 when .NET came out they had a tool that turned UML into method stubs with pseudo-code, and I was sure that my career only had a few years left before it was fully automated away.
pandalicious 6y ago
"apps my mom could build" kind of describes Excel workbooks. People effectively use excel to build (highly constrained) GUIs for processing data using custom logic that they specify themselves. And excel's popularity speaks for itself, it's completely pervasive. So that's the answer; the audience isn't programmers, it's the officeworkers all over the world currently using Excel to automate office tasks and want a better delivery mechanism than a shared Excel file on the office LAN. That's such a big pie that even capturing a small slice of it might be a reasonably profitable endeavor.
- miek 6y ago
  You are spot on. I know a ton of people who fit your description. I wish this were higher up the comment stack. So many people are missing this simple viewpoint.

outworlder 6y ago

Give me an intuitive, drag and drop enviroment where I can plan out my AWS deployments and tie resources together, and then write the cloudformation for me. Then I'll be happy. Also, this thing requires a different login even though I'm logged in to an AWS account with corporate SSO. Like quicksight and other tools do, and it's just as infuriating. Just let me start using and bill for usage.

gator-io 6y ago

What's the saying? Code-less environments make 90% of building an app simple, and 10% impossible.

didip 6y ago

I love it for the purpose of building custom internal apps. What would make it better is if: * It’s open source, therefore installable on-prem and free from vendor lock-in. * It has multiple swappable backends. This thing and Bootstrap can replace a myriad of random in-house apps.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago

Using data tables to publish websites and apps is an interesting concept and having an in-house tool to produce most commonly requested ones makes total sense. Look at their templates: Inventory management, Team Tracking, Surveys, Reporting...etc. It makes sense. One hard problem here though, by the looks of it, the tool is a database designed by engineers in response to a lengthy requirements document. It has no regard for user experience, and is one of those things you can use, only if you go through a 3 week training course. This, imo, is where AWS could borrow from startup playbook, and instead of launching a spaceship, start instead with a paper airplane. Imagine if all you could do was to publish an inventory-management tool, that in one-click integrated with Amazon Pay and let the customers buy your products on a website? Maybe Amazon is waiting for someone else to build this on top of their tools, and then make it available, but that poses a question why. Why would someone build on top of Honeycode, only to have Amazon eventually make it their own? Interesting concept, but it's got a long ways to go before anyone needs to be scared of what Amazon can do with this thing.

kirillzubovsky 6y ago
p.s. One thing I can't figure out is if Honeycode can function as an API. If I am already using AWS for my other infra, keeping my data inside their "Excel" and then auto process and export it to somewhere using drag-and-drop automation, that makes perfect sense. In fact, the whole "no code" Dreamweaver analogy isn't all that fitting. If they just said "Excel spreadsheet on steroids that integrates with other AWS product," would make more sense, to me at least.

stoavio 6y ago

Too bad this is just another low-code CRUD offering for SMB/Enterprise. This would have been so much more interesting if it allowed me to build an app for mobile and web with a custom domain, database modeling and storage, integration-eque triggers/automations, all while keeping the underlying platform invisible to the user. Instead, I have to create a team on AWS and then invite members who then have to install the Honeycode player on their phones just to use my app. In other words, Bubble needs more competition.

caetris1 6y ago

It's cloud-native Visual Basic.

harrisreynolds 6y ago

Not surprising to see Amazon get in the game with a #nocode tool. I will be interested to compare this with Webase [1] where we've focused first on custom views and the data model but have yet to support custom notifications (coming soon though!). Although the world still needs lots of developers I do believe there is a BIG opportunity in the #nocode space. [1] https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com

pbreit 6y ago

Has anyone ever built a decent app with a tool like this?

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buboard 6y ago

and we're back to MS Access ! about time, really

glaberficken 6y ago
Came here to write exactly this, but thought I'd do a quick Ctrl+F first =)

runawaybottle 6y ago

I feel like many of these no-code tools are taking an all or nothing approach that will ultimately ossify into a very specific form. However, if something like Honeycode also had a robust programming/design API, you allow for tons of flexibility. We could build a lot of it without code, and we could build a lot of it with code, and even better, we could code more things that can be built without code on an app by app basis.

nyxtom 6y ago

Really wish Amazon would stop trying to eat all software startups.

pinewurst 6y ago

I see two+ entwined fundamental problems here: 1. Amazon isn't especially known for high quality software. I picture lots of weird corner cases that won't be tested or fixed in their frantic pursuit of new features (which is what's rewarded, like Google if not more so). 2. Sky high Amazon attrition - especially in engineering!* - means that it's always newbies who'll be working on it, under high pressure. I have trouble imagining a non-trivial corporate app with any kind of lifespan living on this thing. *I live in Seattle so any Bezbots can save themselves the denial of harsh reality.

careyrouse 6y ago

Co-Founder of https://www.cloudternal.com https://www.cloudternal.com. I'm really surprised they have a limit of 100k records on their tables. They will have the same issue that Airtable has, it's just not suited for enterprise. We believe there is still a gap in the "database app for non-technical users" space, so we created one that can handle millions of records, provides granular permissions down to the cell level and targets those creative (yet non-developer) users who end up pushing Excel beyond its usefulness.

sbr464 6y ago
I agree, I tried to upload a 1 Megabyte sized CSV and was promptly shut down (on the trial tier). In 2020, a floppy disk worth of data is too much?
nslindtner 6y ago
Looks awesome FYI: When you try to request early access, I get an SSL error.
- thomasrognon 6y ago
  Hey there, I set that up. The request early access link is a Google Form so it was an issue somewhere between you and Google. It works for me now, but if it still doesn't work for you, please email Carey personally (email is in his HN profile).

codingdave 6y ago

The comments here strengthen exactly what I was thinking - this is yet another flavor of low-code app development. I see similarities to Salesforce, SharePoint, Lotus Notes, Airtable, and all the other startups on this path that don't seem to realize that they are re-inventing modern versions of products that have been around since the 80s. I spent years in my early career doing Lotus Notes Dev, then shutting down all those apps to go to Sharepoint, then shutting all those down to go to Salesforce. I walked away from that churn about a decade ago to just do SaaS, so I can't truly speak to which of the newcomers has the most promise. But I have yet to see someone take on this market with full knowledge of what came before. I see potential for someone to really learn the in and outs of all such products over the last 30+ years, talk to the folks who have re-done their LOB apps in multiple products over that time, figure out what worked and build a true "best-of-breed" solution. When someone does do that, I'm all in. Until then... the legacy apps I mentioned above are past their time, so pick your favorite flavor from all the new ones.

viksit 6y ago

While I’m always skeptical of no code systems, this is the first one that seems to bring to the web what Visual Basic And Access did for Windows — VBscript, GUI driven layouts and connectors, and eventually the pipeline of programmers who went from VB to VC++ and Java. Amazon also has the Microsoft—esque brand to really drive this into the Zeitgeist. IMO this might be the most game changing product they have launched recently given how much of a business impact it can have if distributed well. But therein also lies its biggest challenge - Amazon hasn’t historically been good at offering their services to the small businesses and consultants that could leverage this and build for the long tail. I wonder if they have a strategy for that.

ricardobeat 6y ago

There is Podio (https://podio.com/ https://podio.com/) in this space which I think is really cool - or it was when I tried many years ago. Always wonder why it is not more popular.

tyingq 6y ago

Google shut down their similar tool: https://support.google.com/a/answer/9682494?p=am_announcement&rd=1 https://support.google.com/a/answer/9682494?p=am_announcemen...

djohnston 6y ago

It seems like a start, but unless they're supporting a community plugin ecosystem you'll be at the mercy of what their team decides is worth integrating. Maybe it doesn't matter.

dennisgorelik 6y ago

Ability to write code - is the main way to deal with application complexity. If Amazon Honeycode does not have that critical feature (ability to write code) - then Amazon Honeycode is useless for creating any complex applications.

julianeon 6y ago

Are there any tools where you can design something in the UI, and then export it as actual React or JavaScript code, that you can then take and upload somewhere else? Using low-code as a developer to iterate faster, and bang out lots of mini code apps quickly, is an interesting idea.

papito 6y ago
The idea of code generation is not new - but it seems like the new crop of software developers are learning the same concepts and lessons all over again. Hey - state machines are so hot right now. Back in the day there was this cool concept of creating a bunch of UML diagrams for your business logic and them BOOM - press a button and here is your C++ code. But then architecture astronomy hits the asphalt and you realize that most of the hard work is still ahead. So things like IBM Rational Rose were only sold to suckers.
mango_indian 6y ago
I am trying, https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ https://www.gatsbyjs.org/

rickyplouis 6y ago

These types of tools seem excellent for prototyping, but always fall short in addressing the real world issues of increasing scope and maintainability. No code web development (Wordpress, and Squarespace) has largely thrived due to blogs and largely static content, but I fail to see a similar use case in mobile app development. Maybe it's a lack of imagination, but how valuable is a tool like this outside of todo lists, blogs, and other minor use cases?

ngcc_hk 6y ago

Not for Hongkonger though. Browser work but that is not the point. Is it just USA?

systematical 6y ago

It's a spreadsheet and for when you need more (aka have to write some code), there are conditions, functions etc... https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-functions/90 https://honeycodecommunity.aws/t/honeycode-functions/90

kayman 6y ago

In my experience, when people build apps without having to write code, the first iteration is awesome. Get something working and shows great promise. But as complexity grows, the app ends up being a badly designed excel screen on the web.

topicseed 6y ago

This is a great way to prototype some simpler, mostly CRUD-like applications. Definitely not future-proof as new business rules may be hard to add after a while, but by then the PoC has shown its value and ROI, and writing a real app might become a no-brainer anyway.

atulatul 6y ago

This is not related to main content of the post. But when I visit the page on a laptop, a sizeable portion is taken by the header- two or three layers in a div (lb-clearfix m-nav-double-row)- one of which is logo and create account ( blank space between logo and button), then the menu bar (blank space on the right below create account button), then the blog menu and search. In the main section body, a large portion on the right is white space. I have not done UI UX for a few years. Is this a good design? Are there reasons behind it? (views on mobile, etc)

theptip 6y ago

So how do you unit / integration test your code in this paradigm? Or is this just for apps that would otherwise be run from a spreadsheet, and not displacing anything an engineer would build?

TrinaryWorksToo 6y ago

This is basically Microsoft Access forms.

mortonpe 6y ago

Is Honeycode for everyone? Nope. Is it for some people? Sure. I’ve read through countless comments extolling the virtues of hiring python, java, or (insert your favorite language) developer. Let’s not lose sight of the customer. Some problems don’t need a perfect solutions. Some problems need a solution that is more concurrent than excel. Some problems just need a quick solution for now. You would be surprised to learn how many small business run in these imperfect solutions.

hannasm 6y ago

And if if ever gets discontinued you lose everything you might have ever built forever.

brisance 6y ago

Seems like an AirTable/PowerApps competitor, but an early version which means the polish isn't there. Personally I prefer Coda.

wsc981 6y ago

When looking at the website, I do think this could be a very decent product that could fulfil a business need. From what I've seen many businesses use Excel sheets as a sort of apps. And this seems to be a mobile-compatible version of that idea. Of course it'll be very limited, but for a certain niche of business apps it could be very useful as a replacement for Excel.

Illniyar 6y ago

So this is Microsoft Access as a service?

guerrilla 6y ago
Looks like it. My first thought was Filemaker Pro or the old Claris Works/AppleWorks Database program.

ezconnect 6y ago

Delphi was my first experience on apps without much coding, it helped me understand event driven programming.

pembrook 6y ago

From the looks of it, I’d say Amazon applied the same level of UX thinking into this as they applied to the AWS admin panel—which is to say, not enough. I think using this in the real world will be about as easy as trying to buy the right phone charger on Amazon.com. People consistently underestimate how long it takes to learn complicated interfaces. At which point you might as well just learn python. Take any advanced 3D modeling software for example. They are visual interfaces, not command line tools, but they might as well be considering the learning curve for the average user. Having visual buttons doesn’t necessarily mean the process of building a 3D model (or a piece of software) is suddenly easy.

ravivyas 6y ago

If you want a new perspective to the entire nocode space, remove the line "building apps" from any conversation or line of thought. A spreadsheet to track a project need not be an app, the ability to temporarily give access to internal data to a non developer team (which become CSVs in email) is not an App. It is this need of building a full solution which actually takes us away from the need of the users to the need to justify a resource for the thing.

pjmlp 6y ago

Looks quite basic versus alternatives like OutSystems.

bram2w 6y ago

A while back Microsoft announced Microsoft Lists, which is a similar tool. Of course there are also existing tools like Airtable, Bubble, Mendix etc. All these tools are great, but they have some downsides in my opinion. - If the product ever gets discontinued you might lose all your work. - All these tools have limits regarding the amount of rows you can store. - If your business depends on such a product and the pricing model changes, it might bankrupt you. - You can't create or download real plugin that integrate well if you are missing features. - In most cases you can't host it at your own servers. - You might end up in a vendor lock-in. These are some of the reasons why I started Baserow. It is an open source alternative to Airtable and in the far future also for tools like Bubble. While it is still in an early phase there is a test version at https://baserow.io https://baserow.io that everyone can try. In the coming weeks you can expect the open source release. Right now, I am finishing up the documentation, examples, plugin boilerplate and some final small changes. After that you can self host it without any limits, vendor lock-in or price changes.

lukeramsden 6y ago
Wow, that looks great. An COSS alternative is exactly what this space needs. I wish you great success.
- bram2w 6y ago
  Thanks! I agree, was surprised to learn that there aren't that many good open source no-code tools out there.
  - zubairq 6y ago
    I couldn't find the source code, where is it on github?
    - bram2w 6y ago
      The open source release will probably happen within 3 weeks from now. It is an early test version that is running on baserow.io, but this is for trying it out only. I still need to write documentation, an openapi spec, a plugin boilerplate and some other small things. When that is finished I will make the code available publicly.

steveharman 6y ago

"Honeycode – Build Web & Mobile Apps Without Writing Code" For the sake of clarity, couldn't they have come up with a name that didn't include the word "code" ?

koliber 6y ago

Is this Amazon's disruption of VisualBasic?

sciprojguy 6y ago

Great. Another ReactNative. Just what we need.

brainwipe 6y ago

These kinds of systems are all well and good if you have a person in your business with an analytical mind enough to pick it up and all your needs will fit the limits of the framework. If your business domain has a feature that doesn't fit then you have a difficult conversation with business people who won't change their process to fit the platform and won't pay to rebuild in a platform that does fit. If you do manage to customise Honeycomb then you're down a path of not really fitting into their model or having to upgrade on their product roadmap, not yours. I've seen SAP and Sharepoint "installations" that have been customised beyond all recognition. Where this will fit nicely is for those internal apps where people are just using Excel or Access-like systems.

bencollier49 6y ago

The looks remarkably like an Access MDB application.

gonesilent 6y ago

Taking the thunder from the coupon code site Honey. Won't be searching for Amazon honey or code and finding real honey. It like doing this with product names.

Aeolun 6y ago

What if I need more than 100k rows per table? Where is the unlimited (enterprise) plan?

dsbanaj 6y ago

This works only for the development of simple applications. If these no-code/low-code platforms want to be considered for serious development, they need to decouple front-end and back-end tiers. A developer can build front-end in one no-code application (e.g Webflow), or Angular/React for slick single-page applications; and the backend in another backend APIs specific no-code application. It will also enable the backend code to be called from native iOS and Android apps.

pradn 6y ago

I don't see Microsoft PowerApps mentioned in the comments. (https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/ https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/) It's one of the most significant recent entrants into the "make an app" space. It looks like Powerpoint and its coding is simple, with formulas like Excel. They sell licenses mainly to companies (creating internal app stores).

DoctorOW 6y ago
Not sure if this includes Power Automate but I find it really handy for the work I do. If you're not already familiar with how an API works, being able to point and click on an icon to setup automation is great.

zubairq 6y ago

As a developer of an open source low code tool https://github.com/zubairq/pilot https://github.com/zubairq/pilot I think it is great that Amazon has entered this space. It really validates it for the mass market!

MangoCoffee 6y ago

Am I correct to say that we have go down to this road before (no code app)?

shmooth 6y ago

i was hoping for something at least semi-interesting. not so much. airtable, with a google aesthetic. eh. i feel like Anvil is on the right, almost perfect, track -- except for their choice of Python over Javascript. They chose self.Python over javascript. ok. life is full of decisions. in their defense, callbackjavascript is...not so promising. bubble went with..something. right idea. not the best execution. still, a step in the right direction. saw a couple other tools out there that are trying to cross the chasm, but nothing as good as VB yet.

psmithsfhn 6y ago

muddi900 6y ago

>Sharing data across multiple users and multiple spreadsheets is difficult =Importrange() In google sheets.