UI/UX question regarding some web apps I've seen recently

[David Schwartz 413]

I've recently encountered some web apps that use "bubbles" (rectangles, circles, etc.) that you drop onto a canvas that are associated with some specific logic. You can "zoom-in" and perform more detailed design of those things that goes far beyond just editing values in an Object Inspector. (eg., a whole web page editor with access to templates, libraries of various media, etc., for creating the landing page.) 

 

Then you can connect them to one or more other bubbles to represent a flow. It's roughtly similar to how the LiveBindings Designer works, only these are much higher-level operations with access to a larger variety of object editors.

 

The few I've seen all seem to be using a very similar (if not the same) UI framework.

 

The approach they're taking represents a rather high-level of graphical programming. They're all very application-specific, but allow non-technical users to build fairly complex apps that don't require a single line of programming. They're used to design apps that implement logic supported on a given SaaS site.

 

For example, one lets you create a web landing page with several fields on it. If one of them is a phone#, then when the user clicks the Submit button, you go to a bubble that says, "If there's a phone# given, then send it to this email or message#". It also logs the submission, adds the data to a mailing list, and does some other stuff. This logic is all built-in, although it works with Zapier to let you add logic to unrelated stuff if you want.

 

We still don't have a view of our apps from inside the IDE that shows the forms and flow between them on a big canvas in the same way that DB designers have had for DB layouts for at least 15 years now, let alone some way to build a UI like this within Delphi. TMS has their Diagram Studio, although it's rather limited. There's also Mitov's OpenWire framework.

 

I don't know what these web-based frameworks are, but they seem to be gaining in popularity.

 

Is anybody doing this with Delphi (or even C#)? Or are we going to have to abandon this ship to get access to UI/UX trends that web devs seem to be leap-frogging over us and providing to customers?