What I like about this, is that it allows quickly to make simpler sites that can be edited. I don't want to program upload images ever again, or edit fields. Why do this?!
Anyhow, storage seems to be confusing some of you, they explain/document that here http://mavo.io/docs/storage/
I think this is neat idea and we really need to innovate and move past coding crud apps all the time. Developer bootcamps are proof we are not doing anything new.
The problem is that it says simple, while talking about Git for goodness sakes; commit permissions and such. It says no code. I disagree... you need to know HTML basics to even comprehend the Mavo way.
Why not just make a vanilla HTML page if that is all you need? HTML is not hard... and how is this moving us past CRUD?
I'm not sure I'm reading the same comments as you. None of the ones I read seem overtly negative. Mine is the closest to negative and I explicitly said that I'm just trying to understand not criticize.
You may be reading into them too much. For example, the person saying it is like Angular 1.0 could be negative or very positive depending on your view of Angular.
Edit: I take that back. The one about "not a single line of code" is actually more negative than mine. Although it also happens to be true. That is code.
It looks like you would end up with one html page per page in the site. And when you have 50 pages or more and decides to change the structure you would have to change all the pages. I'm not even sure the tool supports that, you might have to start with git and a standard html editor and change all files. Then you are back to editing html and have not gained much. For _very_ simple sites this might help and it does look very nice.
A bold statement that doesn't really seem to be supported by:
<p property="name" mv-default="[readable(to(filename(image), '.'))]"></p>However, to advertise it as not being programming seems bogus to me. In Excel, you click the "fx" button and choose "SUM" and then select some cells with your mouse and it pops in there =SUM(A1:A4) for you, which feels in practice quite far from what I would consider programming, and I think people who are non-programmers but have the right sort of mindset can usually fathom this stuff.
The example I quoted above, however, looks a lot more like programming to me, and the nested parentheses alone would be enough to scare off a lot of non-technical types. I have dealt with many people over the years who have to do a bit of programming in their roles but really aren't programmers in the conventional sense, and they find things like the difference between A(B(1,2,3)) and A(B(1,2),3) extremely hard to grasp.
Embedding your programming into HTML doesn't make it any less programming. Otherwise, you could say web programming doesn't exist since it's all just HTML script tags.
There's considera le feature differences in the simple templating functionality of this vs. AngularJS 1.x, as well (Angular seems a bit more powerful overall, but this seems to make some of the common things simpler), but I think it's the storage integration which is more of a fundamental difference.
Anyway the idea is nice!
I'm curious about if you've done any research with this experiment yet and if so where can I find it? I'm very curious on ways to make programming more friendly/approachable, but I have found very little research that even begins to examine what a friendly/approachable programming language would even look like.
This has great potential to democratize the building of simple website applications for the masses. Great concept so far!
The idea of websites being just a way to access and modify data that you own entirely (private Git or else) is really neat.
EDIT: actually they do handle authentication but it's GitHub only. Also they seem to support REST APIs (from a custom backend) but no demos or example of that.
[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-app-servic...
I mean, it's useful for some cases now (like as mentioned, non programmers wanting to make more dynamic sites), but back then a lot of cheap/free hosting services didn't support any server side scripting.
Something like this would have let you build an ad hoc CMS on a free hosting service like Geocities. Which would have been pretty useful for the utterly skint.
Now though? It's still useful for some people, and I do think it's something I'll test myself at one point, but I feel the easy access to free/cheap hosting for server side scripts has likely cut down on its usefulness a fair bit.
Note: Not on the team, just searched the docs.
It looks like a great tool for non-programmers and power-users creating simple CMS kind of sites, which is already a great deal. However, typical Web applications are much more complex than what this tool could possibly do, so I would recommend to reconsider that message. Javascript, servers and databases are not the assembly of the web, there's good reason for their existence and in slightly more complex scenarios they simply can't be abstracted away.
It's not just about the message, it's about settling on a specific audience, and with that, focusing the efforts to provide as much value as possible for them. Trying to stay on the middle term for any generic "web applications" might mean the tool will never be flexible enough for professional web apps nor feature complete enough for non-programmers use cases.
It's a neat idea but I feel like I'm missing something. Which part if the approach is "new" here? I'm not criticizing, I honestly feel like I must be missing something and would like to know what.