WebOps Platforms Resources

The real answer to this question is that it works. In some areas it works really well and beyond expectation. Yet, in other areas, it fails to provide a robust infrastructure upon which you can build a commercial solution. The question really, is what is Bubble meant to be? A place to hack around and prove a concept only, or something that a business can build a commercially viable and reliable solution. I've been using the platform for 4 years and built 2 commercial applications on it and I still struggle to answer to this question. While it provides a framework that on the surface seems restrictive, it is actually quite powerful and provides non-hardcore-developers with the ability to create some amazing functionality. Yet, it has numerous areas that have you throwing up your hands in despair. An example is the way it handles plug-ins which you are going to need to use in order to do anything significant (like play videos, display a data-driven chart, take a payment, create a data-driven menu - yikes, play a sound, etc.). While some plug-ins are written in-house, about 95% of them are built by third-parties with little to no validation from Bubble and then sold to paying users. While some of the plug-ins are great, the majority of the ones I've tried and purchased are simply unusable and often not working as advertised. This makes the stability and security of the environment suspect. Recently, I had a plug in that simply wasn't working as advertised. I spent two days chasing that third party for support, only to eventually discover my own hack to make it work. Only a week later, today, I needed help because a significant piece of the systems functionality stopped working. While not a severity 1 for me, it is critical to my ability to resolve a customer issue and is clearly a piece of functionality that we believe is broken across the entire platform (as far as we can tell across multiple accounts). The response we received was that the Bubble office is closed today and only emergency requests would be serviced. Very disappointing response for anyone actually working on Columbus Day and trying to address their own customer issues. While I agree our case is not an "emergency", it is significantly hampering our ability to fix an important issue for our paying customer. Is that a position you want to be in? I think the pricing is fair. It starts cheap and gets expensive quickly, but I think that is a fair model. I think the performance and what you can achieve with it are impressive. We've had no data lost, we've had no data corruption, but yet, getting data out of the platform is almost impossible. I've had simple exports simply not work, I've had simple mass updates (only 800-1,000 records) just hang or stop and all sorts of simple things turn into work that just took way too long to achieve. We've read instances of people building the app in Bubble and integrating the app directly to a SQL database via an API. I'd recommend thoroughly understanding the Bubble paradigm before building a robust application. It forces you to rethink some general design principles, which at the end of the day, actually work pretty well within the tool. After all that, do I recommend it? Until I see the company demonstrate a commitment to providing the mission critical framework upon which companies build their businesses, I can't say that I do. I think it is great to beta test an idea or even get a commercially viable prototype up and running. I just wouldn't bet on it as the solid foundation for a growing enterprise and I am very nervous that I have :-)

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