Wappler 2020 — Year in Review
A year full of innovations, cutting-edge technologies and community growth.
It’s again this time of the year and we are really excited! Let’s take a look back at the most important milestones of Wappler development in 2020.
We have been working really hard in 2020 to deliver cutting-edge technologies in Wappler and we are eager to share with you what our awesome team has accomplished.
January
Blue Tulip Awards 2020
Wappler has been nominated for an innovation award!
Wappler has been selected among the Top 25 game-changing innovators in the Education category of the Blue Tulip Awards 2020.
Success Story
Andre Bender from Swiss Web Factory shared a project for a very happy client, built with Wappler — https://www.dotmov.ch/
February
App Connect Data Store
The Data Store component allows you to store and edit local data in a simple local storage driven database. You can use this component to create a shopping cart, favorite products list, task lists and more.
Google Firebase Hosting
The Google Firebase Hosting offers you a free, easy and quick way to get your project online in just a few clicks.
App Connect Flow
App Connect Flow is a game-changing feature, which allows you to define advanced client side workflows, fully visually. You can setup conditions, set variables and many more.
March
Wappler UI
We’ve improved Wappler UI. The dropdowns have been polished and Bootstrap 4 Properties now show nice colors and icons:
New Hashing Algorithms
We added new strong password hashing algorithms — BCrypt, Argon2i (PHP 7.2+) and Argon2id (PHP 7.3+).
Bootbox Actions
Bootbox actions have been added to App Connect Flow. Bootbox actions allow you to display great looking Bootstrap 4 styled dialogs on your page to alert, confirm or prompt the user for various input.
Bootstrap 4 Toasts
Toasts are lightweight notifications designed to mimic the push notifications that have been popularized by mobile and desktop operating systems. You can use the Toasts component in order to show some information to your users, on specific event.
App Connect Event Calendar
This component is a huge addition to Wappler. You can display all of your events like appointments, bookings, meetings and more in a nice interactive calendar with monthly, weekly and day views. You can add static events or use any data source such as your own database or even Google Calendar:
Success Story
Marcel Schmidt — UX Designer and Developer built his personal website using Wappler — https://www.pixlapps.com/
April
Visual Expression Builder
We implemented an awesome new expression builder in the Dynamic Data pickers in Wappler. Formatting and combining dynamic and static data is easier than before.
Updated Property Inspectors
We improved the visual appearance of the Property Inspectors. You'll notice that the labels of the properties become blue when the default value has been changed. This helps you to easily notice the properties which you've changed.
Bootstrap 4 Theme Manager
The Theme Manager allows you to easily customize the Bootstrap 4 design and create custom themes. The Theme Manager panel allows you to build custom styles by selecting different colors, Google fonts, styling options and many more customization options.
Summernote WYSIWYG Editor
App Connect Summernote is a simple to configure and easy to use WYSIWYG Editor. It offers many different options which allow you to format the content in your CMS the way you want.
Summernote supports Server Connect and its File Upload and Image Resize actions. You can upload images, videos, audio file or just any other file type, directly from the editor.
May
Advanced Bootstrap 4 Theming
Advanced theming has been added to the Theme Manager! You can switch to Advanced Mode and customize 500+ Bootstrap 4 variables, grouped in different categories.
Visual Database Creator
Another great milestone in Wappler’s history — the Database Creator! The Database Creator makes it easy for you to connect to any database and manage its structure. You can create new database tables or edit existing ones, add, edit or remove columns and other database schema operations.
Database Relations
Using the Database Manager you can just add a reference field and select which other table it references. The relation and foreign keys between the tables will be created automatically.
Wappler 3.0 beta 1 — with Node.js integration
One of the most anticipated features has been added to Wappler 3.0 beta 1— Node.js! It’s easy to setup and use and offers all the great powers of Node.js directly in Wappler. Just create a new project and select Node.js as a Server Model. All the required NodeJS packages will be installed and configured automatically, after you setup your project.
Wappler 3.0 beta 2 — with Pages Manager
In Wappler 3.0 beta 2 we introduced the Pages Manager. It allows you to quickly access the pages your are working on in your project, without being bothered with all the required script files which are generated automatically.
Wappler 3.0 beta 3 — with full Node.js integration in Docker
In Wappler 3.0 beta 3 we added full support for NodeJS in Docker. It allows you to create a project using Docker and NodeJS, or setup a target using Docker. You can also select any of the predefined Docker Databases.
Success Story
Another happy customer with a new website built with Wappler — the Swiss artist Regula Mathys. https://www.regulamathys.com/
June
Wappler 3.0 beta 4, 5 and 6 — with Node.js Templating, Server Side Rendering and Security Protection
In the beginning of June we release a couple more beta versions before the official Wappler 3.0 Release. They brought some important features to the Node.js integration in Wappler:
- Node.js Templating, which allows you to easily create master pages with your site layouts and base all your site pages on them.
- Node.js Server Side Rendering, which allows you to use full Server Side data rendering for NodeJS. Server side rendering is great for sharing content on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.
- Node.js Security Protection, which allows you to redirect the users to login page or access denied page for your NodeJS Projects when they are not authorized to view the page:
Wappler 3.0 Released!
On June 26th, 2020 we released Wappler 3.0 full of new exciting features such as — full Node.js integration with Templates and Server Side Rendering, Visual Database Manager, Visual Workflow Builder, Bootstrap 4 Theme Manager, Intelligent Visual Expressions Builder, Easy Cloud Hosting, New Components and many updates! All of this and event more, thanks to the great Wappler Community!
July
Success Story
July brought another success story — a great example of a mobile app built with Wappler by Ken Truesdale from Unique Ideas. PopDish™ shows the top-rated *dishes* (not just restaurants) near you. Discover the most popular entrees, desserts, drinks, and more — all in just a few taps.
August
S3 Connector
The S3 Connector, available for NodeJS and PHP allows you to upload and manage files on cloud storage solutions. It offers rich actions for Server Connect to manage your buckets and files and support for Amazon AWS 3, Digital Ocean Spaces, Vultr and Linode.
Amazon AWS Support for Docker
You can easily deploy your site to Amazon AWS in just a few clicks thanks to the Amazon AWS support in Docker manager.
App Connect S3 Upload
App Connect S3 Upload component allows you to create client side upload pages for direct upload to S3. It’s fully customizable and with great Bootstrap 4 styling and custom progress tracking.
Traefik Integration
Wappler offers full custom domain support and automatic free SSL certificate generation for your web site, thanks to Traefik and Let’s Encrypt integration.
Amazon Elastic IP
Amazon Elastic IP addresses allow you to have permanent IP address for your servers. Now when you deploy your custom domains your IP address won’t change every time.
Success Story
A great example of a responsive ecommerce website built by Jon Stanton with Wappler — https://ukpaint.co.uk/
September
Framework 7 v5 with App Connect
Completely rewritten from the ground up, we the new Framework 7 version 5 with App Connect has been added to Wappler . It includes native App Connect integration.
Google Places Search and Autocomplete
Extending on the power of Google Maps, we have integrated the Google Places library so you can easily search and retrieve any places or points of interest in your neighborhood.
SPA with Node.js
Build SPA web sites and apps easily using Node.js. Offer great user experience, by partially refreshing the content while using server side rendering for SEO.
Vultr and Linode Support
We’ve added two more Docker Cloud Hosting providers — Vultr and Linode. You can select them in Wappler and deploy your Docker based website in just a click.
October
Wappler in Education
Franklin University, one of the leading educators of working adults, announced its partnership with Wappler. Producers of visual, low code productivity tools for web designers and developers, Wappler provides the resources to create rich data-driven, highly interactive web sites, and mobile apps. Through this strategic partnership, students in Franklin University’s Interactive Media Design (IMD) program will have access, at no cost, to software that will help prepare them to fill the demand for highly-skilled interactive media designers.
Wappler Getting Started Course
Our Wappler Ambassador Ken Truesdale, known in our community as mebeingken has created an awesome extensive Wappler Getting Stared Course, which covers the core components and options of Wappler. The course is available at: https://learning.uniqueideas.com/courses/wappler-3x-novice
Team Collaboration and Projects Sharing
With Wappler you can connect seamlessly your Wappler project to Github, Gitlab or BitBucket repositories. You can push and pull your local project to the selected remote repository, which makes it really easy to work on the same project with your team or on multiple computers.
Wappler Extensibility
Missing a formatting option or a module in Server Connect? Now you can create your own custom modules and formatters but also provide an UI definition, so that they integrate directly in Wappler UI.
November
Server Connect Globals
You can define Global Variables to be used in all your Server Actions as well as Global Action Steps to be executed automatically.
You can also use the Global Settings for the Database Connections, Security Providers, S3 Providers, OAuth2, JWT Signing and more. Define them once and then just reuse them across all your API Actions.
Server Connect Library
Server Connect Library allows you to create reusable actions, which can be included in any of your API Actions.
Success Story
André Bender, the CEO of Swiss Web Factory built his company website using Wappler — https://www.swf.ch/
December
Scheduled Actions for Node.js
The Schedule options allow you to create actions that run on your server at scheduled times. This is useful if you want to run daily or hourly tasks.
Realtime Data Updates
Realtime Data Updates are here! Thanks to the NodeJS and Socket.IO 3 integration in Wappler now you have full control over the data refresh with a simple Server Action step.
Redis Caching for Node.js and Docker
You can enable Redis caching service with Docker for Node.js — just enable Redis in your target settings and you are ready do cache your pages or API Actions:
Node.js Server Scaling
You can choose to scale up your Node.js server instances. Set the number of “replicas” of the Node.js server you need and they will be started on deploy.
When used with Traefik, it will function as a full load balancer and it will distribute the client requests between all the running Node.js servers.
But that’s not all — this year our amazing community has almost doubled, reaching 12000 users and the success user stories keep growing!
As we end this year, we are looking forward to expand Wappler even more in 2021 with many updates and amazing new features!
Not using Wappler yet?
Download Wappler, and don’t forget to join our community forum! Share your experience, get help, showcase your work or just have nice chat with others.
