lunes, 27 de enero de 2014

nuBuilder, a PHP alternative to Oracle APEX?

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Today, I would like to talk about nuBuilder. nuBuilder is an interesting tool I discovered last weekend. In this post we will take a superficial look to it. At date of this little article, screenshots and nuBuilder version downloadable is version 2, working with MySQL. It's suppose soon (February) will be available nuBuilderPro (3), new version created from scratch, thath can works using PDO with other databases.
 
First of all, nuBuilder Wikipedia entry say:

nuBuilder is a RAD tool for creating web-based Back Office Applications.

The nuBuilder platform is an open source PHP/MySQL/Javascript database development tool which stores forms, reports, company data and any custom code in MySQL and displays the content dynamically in a web-browser.
With nuBuilder, you have a bunch of PHP and other files, being this nuBuilder core itself. When you develop an application with nuBuilder, you don't have to think about having sources on one side, and development enviroment on other. nuBuilder has all integrated it. You can think about something like Microsoft Access, where data resides on the same way as forms, code, and so on.

But how internally works?

nuBuilder is a set of PHP files composing the nuBuilder core. To work over a new application with nuBuilder, you create a new folder, with some files. You just need to modify config to start working with nuBuilder for a new site.


On config.php file, you define database (database must be populate with some nuBuilder system tables, a 300KB SQL file), site name, dbuser, dbpassword .... just with this config params, index.php will take care of login and redirects to nuBuilder API to start working. Once this is finished, you can point your browser to something like:
http://ip_where_server_is/db/yourapplication
...where db is, by default, the folder where each applications folders are stored.

Your new recently created application, will be your development enviroment too. How?





 nuBuilder has a special user called globeadmin. Where you login to an application with this user (each application can have his own globeadmin password) you get some "special powers" over the application, and a new tab, called "Setup" appears.


 
 
 

You can configure USER access from here, add activities (PHP code and reports, yes, has a builtin reporting system), create new FORMS, objetcs (widgets inside forms), Style, and so on.... You can refine events for objects onBlur, beforeOpen and so on.... coding some in PHP and others with Javascript.

All objects, will be stored in "nuBuilder systems" tables on database (a simple export, saves data and application itself)

nuBuilder (and nuBuilder applications) uses the 2 screen model to provide an intuitive and flexible front-end for users and developers.

Another important "feature" is thath nuBuilder is used by nuSoftware to create his solutions. I mean, nuBuilder is used day by day on production enviroments

There are a Youtube playlist, where you can see a videotutorial about nuBuilder2

nuBuilder Pro will be available on February, free, and opensource, and in this video you can see some features. Some features about nuBuilder 3 was posted too on official blog on this entry. Obviously, programming style shares same principles, for this reason, knowledge you learn with nuBuilder 2 is shared with nuBuilder Pro, but applications will be not migrable.



Let me say..IT ROCKS!!!

1 comentario:

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