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

Service Studio walkthrough

In order to simplify application development, OutSystems created a highly capable, simple, and intuitive Integrated Development Environment (IDE), giving it the name Service Studio.

Service Studio is the main tool we use to perform the following:

  • Create applications and modules.
  • Create user interfaces (UIs) for our web and mobile applications.
  • Define the data model.
  • Define business processes and Timers (asynchronous processes).
  • Debug our applications (both server-side and client-side).

When we open Service Studio, we must connect to an OutSystems environment (cloud or on-premises) by providing a server URL (or selecting an existing one from the Environment dropdown) and our developer credentials.

The following screenshot shows the OutSystems Service Studio Switch Environment connection popup:

Figure 2.1 – The Service Studio connection popup

After successfully connecting, we will see an overview...