A few months ago a friend of mine called Ben Clifford said “Mike you really need to check out bubble you will like it”. I eventually got around to checking it out.
I was thinking about the scenario where we are building an API or an integration use case and one of the challenges is to build a simple UI which can demonstrate its use to your project stakeholders without the significant overhead of building and maintaining a coded app. Obviously there are low code options in the Microsoft stack, while I like Power Apps, I wanted to look at other options and thought its a good time to try out Bubble.
I went for the $29 per month personal plan for Bubble and put together a simple app where I wanted to use the API Connection to talk from my bubble application to Azure API Management to use an API. I must admit it was very simple to connect my API, trigger it and display data in the bubble forms. Ill share a couple of videos in upcoming posts about how I did it.
The big positive for me was there was no need to do any complicated expressions difficult. There was a small learning curve, in particular understanding the 2 different types of API (Data and Action). Data is an API your page can just trigger and read where as an action is something you can trigger from a bubble workflow. In the workflow case, an example would be that you define that a workflow will run when someone clicks a button and it will trigger the workflow. The workflow will then call your API and then update the state of your controls.
I am thinking we could use a presentation API for a Bubble app which would allow us to integrate with some of our interfaces via things like Logic Apps to connect to different systems and perhaps we integrate with a Function App if we need to run some custom code. It might look something like the below.
One thing I do like above Power Apps is that its easy to do a public facing app that looks like a web page. There are authentication options such as connecting it to Azure AD via SSO that ill probably play around with at something, but for now I felt it was a really simple way to put together a prototype for some of the things I need to do, but I know others are doing interesting real world apps from a citizen developer perspective. Thumbs up to Bubble for making this simple to use!
