Wyaworks - App Builder for Non-Coders

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1. Paul
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 1:04 am

   Argh, not another private beta.

2. Mike
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 3:03 am

   WyaCracker sounds like Drupal + webform module (http://drupal.org for details)

3. Simran
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 3:39 am

   I don’t mind private betas, as long as the company makes it relatively easy for an interested person to get an invite. Newsvine’s Private Beta, for exaple, was really popular.

   I like the idea of Wyaworks, but it isn’t too appealing to the eye (the website ie.). Hopefully we’ll see improvements. I will wait till your next post about Wyaworks, Michael. Hopefully, they’ll be better settled by then.

4. Simran
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 3:51 am

   Btw, I’ve submitted this into digg. Link.

5. Saul Weiner
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 7:06 am

   This sounds just like:
   - AppExchange
   - DabbleDB
   - LazyBase
   - StarterBase
   …

6. john
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 7:07 am

   At http://www.wyaworks.com/

   on Sunday April 30, 8am, there is no “try the beta” link on the left sidebar.

   was it there when you posted, and now they’ve taken it down?

7. Phil Sim
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 7:13 am

   John, you need to go to the Wyacracker site: http://www.wyacracker.com

8. john
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 7:41 am

   Thanks for the clarification Phil

9. Mike
   

   April 30th, 2006 at 8:05 am

   There was a time when Michael used to profile serious companies with serious and new innovative products.

   Now its seems just a contest of who can have more posts per day, techcrunch or valleyway to get more traffic.

   Build a silly web form and have the results email to you! Wow, are you kidding? This is 2006 and not 1995 with netscape 4.7 as the popular browser.

10. Phil Sim
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 8:39 am

    Firstly, the results aren’t e-mailed back to you. They reside in the Wyacracker application shell you create, where you can manipulate their output, export to Excel, XML or RSS. Nobody is proclaiming that this application is technically earth-shattering, it was released as a forerunner to the launch of the main platform (which I can guarantee you is absolutely innovative) because it was very easy to do and because there didn’t seem to be much around that enabled bloggers or ordinary users to easily create a form/set-up the database behind it/manage and export results. This was very deliberately kept as simple as we could possible make it in order to help it appeal to ordinary users who otherwise might never have thought about including a form in their blog or email. Blogs didn’t catch a light because they were technically brilliant, they worked because they solved a simple need, which was to enable the every person to publish.

11. Mike
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 8:49 am

    Hey I’m not putting down your solution - anyone who creates anything out there that solves a problem deserves credit and praise for their work.

    It’s this blog that is becoming diluted with daily posts of incomplete, half-beta, coming soon, sites that is making this site less interesting.

    At least he presented an accurate description of your service. I get reminded of a review of http://www.zooomr.com that was potrayed as the “flickr killer app” (”flickr has some catching up to do” was the quote I believe), which now seems to be offline???

    Anyone know what became of zooomr?

12. Phil Sim
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 9:00 am

    I’ll respectfully disagree. I read TechCrunch because Mike consistently is the first to publish news of new companies that I find interesting… Not every company or product is in my sphere of interest, but I’m happy for TechCrunch to let me make the decision as to whether they’re interesting or not and default on the side of publishing more than less…

13. Serge
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 9:12 am

    also can be added to the list: wufoo.com

14. Ted
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 9:26 am

    I believe you could use Ning to do any of these tasks. Perhaps not, but Ning is pretty powerful and has developed nicely. If they’re able to do 4 more new versions of Ning which improve as much as they did from version 1 to version 2, they’ll have something everyone will be able to use and something really useful and valuable.

15. Cedric Savarese
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 9:57 am

    Thanks for mentioning FormAssembly.com

    Yes, Ning first comes to mind when you talk about letting non-coders build web applications… though I wonder.. only coders like to build web apps for the fun of it. I would think that non-coders would rather keep their hands off of it.

16. Russell Limprecht
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 1:01 pm

    Anyone know what became of zooomr?

    Mike, I just signed on to Zooomr. It is live and kicking.

17. Phil Sim
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 2:47 pm

    This is going to be a very interesting space. ZohoCreator is a nice product in the Write Your own Apps area as well. I’m pretty convinced this is a signficant new frontier the only issue is will it take a big boy to popularise the concept outside of a niche market?

18. Ivan
    

    April 30th, 2006 at 10:49 pm

    This is a hot area these days, but I wonder how far it will really go. Web applications are increasing in complexity, not decreasing. While the early years of webapps might see some of this “build your own”, I don’t think you’ll too much of them down the road.

19. mark
    

    May 1st, 2006 at 2:40 am

    This is rubbish. Who wants a form builder? Not me! This sounds like a less functional version of ruby on rails.

20. dusoft
    

    May 1st, 2006 at 7:52 am

    typo: usefull

21. Jason Kolb
    

    May 1st, 2006 at 8:37 am

    Unless these apps start giving people guidance towards building “applications” that use some kind of standards, all the apps built with these are going to be walled islands of data. Sure they’ll probably expose data using RSS or something like that, but really, what’s the point? Microsoft InfoPath’s been doing the same thing (albeit not Web-based) for years, and look how much traction that’s gotten. And they even let you use existing XML schemas, which I haven’t seen supported by any of these apps yet.

22. Randy McKee
    

    May 2nd, 2006 at 11:49 am

    Couple of thoughts upon reviewing this (my favorite coder sent me this in lieu of me tapping again for another app fix):
    ‘I would think that non-coders would rather keep their hands off of it.’…This non-coder uses WebFormApps routinely to gather forced and normalized data from several groups within our organization. Keep my hands off? Nope. Free solutions…wow.

23. Phil
    

    May 2nd, 2006 at 6:17 pm

    How come no one talks about Ning? Not exactly the same thing as easy, but helps people create web apps nontheless

24. David Mackey
    

    May 6th, 2006 at 6:03 pm

    Thats pretty cool. Though there is a long way to go before full applications can be developed.

25. Jill
    

    May 12th, 2006 at 5:42 pm

    I like non-coder web apps, but I don’t like my Microsoft Office Live (website) beta, as it prohibits adding source codes. I built a form in Wyacracker relatively easily (though a lot of web 2.0 apps give hardly enough instruction for us mid-level computer people, and we waste a lot of time stumbling through building something - like w/Jumpcut), but after making the form I wasn’t able to add it as easily as expected, i.e, not at all because of the Office Live code protections. SO, I will never be able to add forms (or many other great web parts out there) to my business site.

26. Nadeem
    

    December 13th, 2006 at 2:20 am

    Hey Jill,

    I completely agree with what you say, its a typical non-coder approach. Its true that one cannot add source codes and neither are these tools that user friendly. I am a non-coder too, so what i would want from a tool is to do all the complex things the easy way. And i haven’t yet come across a tool that does exactly this thing for me though i work on a web tool myself. Its called “zeroCode” check out the tool here —> http://www.zerocode.com

    This buddy of mine does all the things and more, what the other tools cannot do. It is t’s all Java and XML behind the scenes, the Design Environment is completely browser based. And, best of all, you do all this in a browser - no applets, no AJAX in the construction process.

    It may still need some rework but the tool is surely a “non-coders” best friend. I can say for sure that this tool is far beyond where the other tools are today.