[RUBY] NoCode Glide's first app development

Introduction

It's been 5 months since I changed jobs as an engineer. I was impatient that I had never developed an app myself, so I focused on no-code. No-code is a system development method that does not require writing a program for system development, and is characterized by being able to be developed even by non-engineers. This time, we will share the procedure for developing the first service and the knowledge gained there. The time required is 1 hour for the no-code part (including 30 minutes for studying) + 5 hours for data collection, for a total of 6 hours.

What is Glide

There are many types of no-code, and it is clear that each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, and what it can and cannot do. EC sites Shopify and BASE are also one of the no codes. I wanted to develop an app for smartphones, so I chose Glide, which can develop PWA, as a tool. PWA is a mechanism that can provide users with the behavior of a native application on a website. Glide has the advantage of having the lowest learning cost among many tools, and the fact that you can use spreadsheets that you are familiar with as a database. The learning cost is in the order of Bubble> Adalo> Glide, so it is recommended to start with Glide, which is easy to get to.

App to make this time

I like to go around delicious shops, so I will make a restaurant search app. I used GoToEat point available stores as data. I will briefly introduce scraping later.

Flow of making an application with Glide

Prepare a spreadsheet

First, prepare the data in a spreadsheet. This time, in order to create an application that displays detailed information of each restaurant from the list of restaurants, prepare the restaurant information in a spreadsheet as shown below. The first line describes the item name, and the second line describes the data.

Create a new app with Glide

Once you have the data (you can change it later), create a new app in Glide. Open the Glide Top screen and click the "Sign up" button in the header.

After completing the registration according to the procedure, the following screen will be displayed. Click "From Google Sheet ..." from "Create app ..." of "Apps".

The file selection screen will appear. Select the spreadsheet you created earlier and click the "Select" button.

The contents of the spreadsheet will be automatically analyzed and the application creation screen will be displayed as shown below. By default, the data is displayed in a list format, and you can customize it from here.

After that, you can change the layout by selecting it from Style (template),

You can develop apps by selecting display items from the pull-down menu!

Publishing the app

Publishing your app is easy. Click "SHARE" in the upper right of the application display area (next to the left of the right side menu). A new window will appear, click "Publish app".

You can use the app from the displayed QR code or URL.

Please also refer to the App I created this time.

function: List of stores Display detailed information Display stores on MAP Favorite, comment posting function Narrow down by genre and rank Group by genre

What I liked about Glide

With a simple layout, it takes less than 10 minutes to publish the app, and I think it's best not to need any difficult knowledge. No-code development tools that dramatically improve development costs and speed are groundbreaking services that address the chronic shortage of IT talent. Also, the faster you develop, the more you can stand out from the competition.

What I thought was not good for Glide

It is less customizable and has less layout freedom. There is a trade-off between learning costs and degrees of freedom. Next, I will try using Adalo and Bubble. In addition, the free version has restrictions such as being able to handle only 500 lines, so it is necessary to reduce data or charge as necessary.

About scraping

We use the information obtained from Stores where GoToEat points can be used as the data to be flowed into the spreadsheet. I chose the tabelog, which is very helpful when choosing a restaurant. Since my usual work is mainly crawler development, I scraped it as a practice. It takes about 5 hours in total, 3 hours for coding + 2 hours for waiting for crawl, which is longer than the no-code part. This is a no-code introductory article, so I won't go into detail about scraping. I will put the code, so please refer to the README of Github for details on how to use it.

Summary

We are now in an era where services can be easily created at the individual level in a short period of time. There are still many restrictions, and programming is more flexible, but I think that the area where no-code can be done will expand further in the future. As an engineer, I want to be able to use it well rather than being robbed of work by Nocode.