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

Patterns, templates, and widgets

Patterns, templates, and widgets work in the same way both on mobile and reactive web (the code generation is a little bit different, but that's abstracted by the platform). The differences are based more on the type of each patterns or widget that we should use after consideration of the devices on which the applications will run.

The OutSystems platform knows that, when we create a phone or tablet-type module, it must adapt the patterns and templates to the selected type, thereby facilitating the developer's selection of which ones should be used, as we can see in Figure 9.1:

Figure 9.1 – Screen templates for a phone or tablet

Basically, smartphones and tablets usually have smaller screens, lower resolutions, and, in terms of usability, the fingers are usually used to navigate the applications.

In light of this, we must pay attention to how the pages are presented in order to have a coherent appearance...