We integrated Blockly to create "Codeless Programming"

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Mark Piller

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Aug 24, 2017, 3:55:21 PM8/24/17
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Hey guys,

I just wanted to express my gratitude to the Blockly team for the amazing work you have done. We finished integrating Blockly into our product and just released it. The integration allows the users of our platform to create API and IoT services (and other types of business logic) without any coding. Here's an example of creating a custom Amazon Alexa skill:

Video:

Blog post with instructions:

Here's another example of creating an API service: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zhEnBuGmP4

We customized and restyled a lot of things including the toolbar, added a bunch of our own blocks, implemented a test drive so one can see how the logic works. More information is available on our website: https://backendless.com/codeless-programming/

Regards,
Mark

Neil Fraser

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Aug 24, 2017, 5:20:25 PM8/24/17
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Very cool.  Some random notes:

Many of your blocks have a checkbox at the bottom that toggle the block between statements and values.  This is a nice solution to an old problem.

As a new user, I'd really like to see tooltips on your custom blocks.  They give you an opportunity to provide the user with more text that fits on the block.  Help links are also not available (at least on the few blocks I checked), but that's probably ok since I've never seen a user use the help menu (intentionally).

Why are the number blocks and the text blocks not at the top of their respective categories?  Is round really more commonly used than number?  And the text block is eighth on the list.

The Blockly team is aware of the issue of a scrollbar appearing when a menu is opened.

Many of the blocks have a warning "Input 'object' must be defined.", however the majority of the blocks don't have an input that's labeled 'object'.  The error messages should probably be tailored to the wording on each block.

All the blocks originating from Blockly are lowercase, whereas all the blocks originating from Codeless start with uppercase.  One side or the other needs to be changed.

Where does one use the 'null' block?

Nice work!





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Mark Piller

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Aug 24, 2017, 5:38:01 PM8/24/17
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Thanks for the feedback, Neil! 

We added our own context-sensitive help system but ran out of time before the release to fully complete it with the content and it is hidden now. The system provides a better-integrated experience of getting help on any given block than the tooltips/help links. We will be opening it up shortly.

We have not given much thought on the ordering of the blocks within individual categories. The idea was to provide a search bar where we indexed all the blocks with keywords a user could use to find them. Additionally, there is a dynamic category in the toolbar called "Most Frequent". The system tracks the usage of every block and puts the most commonly used ones there. But I hear you, the ordering IS important for better user experience and we will revisit it.

The lower/upper casing of the blocks is intentional. Most if not all the Blockly blocks have the structural meaning/semantics, while ours are "functional", meaning they execute an API operation. Knowing where an API call takes place is important for our users, so we needed to have a differentiation.

The "null" block can come in handy when one must check a value received from an API call to see if it is there. Also, one could use it to wipe out a value when saving an object in the database.

Once again thank you for checking it out!

Regards,
Mark


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