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

Types of modules

For a better understanding of this topic, we must make the following analogy: the application is the molecule and its modules are the atoms. Atoms can be of different types, according to their purpose. To this end, when creating modules within the application, five types are natively available:

  • Reactive web app/phone app/tablet app: These are the modules that provide the final user interface for our applications. These are used to build and develop everything related to the frontend, from widgets and patterns to blocks and web screens. These modules can be used in the frontend layer to provide the pages and blocks that users will access for the foundation layer, to create themes, templates, custom patterns, and business-agnostic widgets.
  • Blank: These modules are a blank screen. Here, the prebuilt components are initially minimally used, leaving the programmer the possibility to go their own way.
  • Service: These modules are used from a Core Services perspective...