Introduction to the Betty Blocks platform

Before we jump into what you can build with the Betty Blocks platform, let’s discuss what Betty Blocks is. Betty Blocks is a no-code application development platform hosted in the cloud, so you can access it from anywhere you have internet access.

This means that you can develop applications in your favorite browser from anywhere in the world. Betty Blocks provides you with an all-inclusive tool that allows you to store data, design pages, create workflows, and interact with external services such as APIs, OData, and OpenAPI. All of these form an intuitive user interface that mostly works with drag and drop.

The platform is made for all kinds of developers. Betty Blocks identifies three specific types, namely the citizen developer, the no-coder, and the pro-coder. All of them have something to add to the process of developing an application and need to collaborate with each other to produce the full application. We’ll dive deeper into how this collaboration works between the roles and who can do what.

Because the platform is aimed at citizen developers, you might be wondering whether this mean there is no learning curve? Well… of course there is! Think about people using Excel, for example. Anyone can start inputting data into Excel, but to properly use a lot of its functions, some training might be required. The same goes for Betty Blocks: you might be able to do a lot of basic things already, but to understand all the functions that you can add to an application, it helps to go through a course. This is likely why you are reading this book.

Do no-code and drag and drop mean that you’ll be restricted in terms of what you can do with the platform? The answer to that is no. We’ll dive deeper into this later, but what it comes down to is that the platform allows experienced developers to add code to the platform as well, which increases the capabilities of the platform and thus also the options citizen developers have within the platform.