Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By : Ricardo Pereira
Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By: Ricardo Pereira

Overview of this book

OutSystems is a software development platform that speeds up the build phase by abstracting code and making almost everything visual. This means replacing textual language with visual artifacts that avoid lexical errors and speed up code composition using accelerators and predefined templates. The book begins by walking you through the fundamentals of the technology, along with a general overview of end-to-end web and mobile software development. You'll learn how to configure your personal area in the cloud and use the OutSystems IDE to connect with it. The book then shows you how to build a web application based on the best architectural and developmental practices in the market, and takes the same approach for the mobile paradigm. As you advance, you'll find out how to develop the same application, and the great potential of reusing code from one paradigm in another and the symbiosis between them is showcased.The only application that'll differ from the application in the exercise is the one used in business process technology (BPT), with a focus on a common market use case. By the end of this OutSystems book, you'll be able to develop enterprise-level applications on the web and mobile, integrating them with third parties and other systems on the market. You'll also understand the concepts of performance, security, and software construction and be able to apply them effectively.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: OutSystems 101
5
Section 2: The Magical Path of the Backend
10
Section 3: Create Value and Innovate with the Frontend
16
Section 4: Extensibility and Complexity of the OutSystems Platform

Scaffolding screens

Screen scaffolding is based on the platform's ability to infer the two types of base screens normally needed by an entity: listing and detailing.

Basically, the system is so well designed that we just drag and drop the intended entity onto the canvas of a flow and it automatically creates the list and detail pages related to the respective entity and predictable fields. We may of course have to make some adjustments to the rules and visible fields.

Figure 8.7 – Drag and drop an entity to the UI flow canvas

All widgets and base functionality are created automatically, such as listing ordering, pagination, direct links to details, back functionality, mandatory fields – all that!

Info

In cases of simplistic scenarios, where entities are exposed without being just read-only or if the entities belong to the same frontend module (by default, this is not good architecture, but everything depends on the use case), scaffolding...