Low-code / No-code tutorial with DaDaBIK

How to create a Web application with DaDaBIK?

SHORT ANSWER

On our YouTube channel you can find a series of video tutorials that guide you in the process of creating a web application with DaDaBIK. If you are a beginner, we recommend that you start watching the first episode (of a series of six, published in 2022), which teaches you how to create a Web Application without coding, by exploring the no-code development approach. In particular, we discuss how to create a CRM Web application.

The other episodes of the series explore more advanced DaDaBIK features, that require some coding to implement very specific part of the application logic. Those episodes explore the low-code development approach.

On our channel you will also find other two tutorials of the same kind, How to create an Inventory System and How to create a Helpdesk System. For these two tutorials, at the moment there is just one episode each and it's about no-code development.

For each of the three tutorials (CRM, Inventory System and Helpdesk System) we have a specific page on this site that you can read if you need more details.

Finally you will also find another series, "Low-code corner", published in 2020 for about three months: every Monday morning, a new, short, informal viedo was published, focused on a very specific aspect related to the development of a Web application using DaDaBIK, most of the times related to the questions we receive more often. Most of the episodes in the Low-code corner series are targeted to users who already have experience with DaDaBIK.

LONG ANSWER

Creating a Web application is a time consuming and complex task.

If you ARE NOT a software developer, you probably don't have the skills needed to build a Web application. If you ARE a software developer, you have such skills but probably you don't like to spend time doing those repetitive tasks each time a customer or your boss needs a new business application software.

A Web application creator like DaDaBIK can help both programmers and non-programmers: DaDaBIK is a no-code / low-code development platform that can be used to quickly develop any type of database-driven application without coding.

Can you REALLY develop a business-oriented Web application without coding?

This is usually the first question people ask us when we talk about DaDaBIK.
The answer is yes, you can: depending on how complex your application is, you might be able to build it without any coding (no-code) or, for more complex features and customizations, drastically reducing the amount of code you need to write (low-code).
Even in the second case, most of the development is done using a "point and click" approach: this means that, if you are a programmer, you can focus on the development aspects that really matter.

What kind of application, in practice, you can develop?

This is usually the second question :)
Any application that has to do with data management, browsing or reporting is a good candidate for DaDaBIK development.
Here are some examples: Library Management, Knowledge Management Archive, simple CRM applications, Sales Management applications, Real Estate listing management, Help desk, Warehouse management, Membership management, Photo collection management, Customers/suppliers management, General data-entry applications, On-line Databases.

In this article, I would like to guide you toward the creation of Web Application by using the episodes of the low-code no-code tutorial "How to Create a Web Application with DaDaBIK (2022)" I published on YouTube.

Let's start with the first episode: the idea is to create a CRM application without any coding. The application can be used to manage leads, prospects, customers, sales and to create a dashboard. You don't need any pre-requisite to follow this episode: you will see how to create a MySQL database and how to build your CRM application on the top of it: a Web, responsive, secure, business-ready application.

That's exactly the approach we normally use to build a DaDaBIK application:

1. first we create a database (composed by one or more tables), that's where you store your data e.g. your customers, your products, your orders, whatever you need to register
2. then we build the application logic on the top of it using DaDaBIK: you define the pages that compose your application, the forms, the application "rules", ...

What happens if I already have a database, containing some data and maybe shared with other (DaDaBIK or non-DaDaBIK) applications? What if my data is in Excel/CSV?

Even better, in this case you don't need to follow the step 1, you just tell DaDaBIK how to reach that database or Excel/CSV file and you can start the creation of the application; DaDaBIK will try to guess some of the application "rules" from your database schema, to reduce as much as possible the work you need in step 2.

If you have specific needs that you cannot cover using the point-and-click DaDaBIK approach, you can surely satisfy them: for example you can add custom formatting functions, custom validation functions, custom buttons that trigger the execution of your PHP or Javascript code or - through DaDaBIK hooks - add more sophisticated application logic to be executed when a certain event occurs, for example you can write the code needed to automatically submit an order to your supplier based on a defined product re-order threshold.

The second, third and fourth episodes of the series explore some of those advanced DaDaBIK features, those features require some coding to implement very specific part of the application logic. While the first episode showed the no-code development approach, these episodes explore the low-code development one.