Ultimately I wonder about the limitations of using Bubble to build applications. This seems like a loaded question that requires an understanding of Bubble’s internals.
So 1) What’s a rough sketch of Bubble’s editor under the hood? I suspect it just generates some sort of container / executable that you deploy to an autoscaling infrastructure. Am I way off here? 2) Does this process have any implications on the limitations of using Bubble to build complex web apps? For example, may we see Bubble’s editor be written in Bubble one day?
This is a pretty general question. I’ll go question by question.
We don’t generate code per se, but we run apps using a core code that is shared among apps, some code that is custom to the app (based on which plugins you use), and the actual description of your page. So there’s no executable file. The way it works is a client-side rendering, building the page on the client and sending data over the wire (which is a fairly standard way to do things these days).
Not necessarily. This design doesn’t imply what Bubble can and can’t do. To this question, I’ll quote our FAQ: “Bubble is very open-ended. By combining different data and logic operations, you can create very simple to extremely complicated applications. That said, there are some limits to what the core language can do. Bubble’s language is comparable in power to spreadsheet formulas: you can do a lot, but anything requiring recursive or looping operations on data (such as, for instance, writing a custom machine-learning algorithm) would be difficult. The good news is that Bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The Bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build in Bubble.”
I’ve seen this several places but am having the damnedest time trying to figure out how to connect javascript with bubble. I am planning my first app and have some logic that would be complicated (near impossible) to pull together with bubble alone, but I see no javascript plugin
Yes, you can either reach out to us and we chat, or you can use blockspring and write a custom block. once you’ve done that, you can basically do anything there.
