Blog | Betty Blocks

An Introduction to the New Page Builder Part 2: Pro-Coders

Geschreven door Ryan Whitmore | 3/5/20 10:26 AM

We just couldn't wait to share what we've been working on with the upcoming release of our new Page Builder. If you’re a pro-coder, you’ll want to check out part 2 of our recent webinar: An Introduction to the New Page Builder.

The new Page Builder will come with plenty of features to support no-coders and citizen developers (covered in part 1). But as a pro-coder, your role forms the foundation of the development process. Among other responsibilities, you make no-code strategies possible by ensuring that no-coders and citizen developers are working in a secure, IT-sanctioned environment. That’s why we’re building the new Page Builder from a pro-coder’s perspective — we want it to be a tool that feels familiar to you, one that you’ll enjoy working with. 

The purpose behind the Page Builder is to speed up the development process even more, but also to enable you to continue to use your programming expertise, making all of the customizations you need to make. Here are the main features we show you in the webinar: 

Application Programming Interface (API)  

When stripping a platform like Betty Blocks down to its bare bones, it’s mostly a constant stream of sending and receiving data. Although we’ve been doing this for years through our trustworthy REST API, we decided to renew our techniques and work on a new, more future-proof method.

Without getting too deep into the technical specs, GraphQL is an open-source data query and manipulation language for APIs, and a runtime for fulfilling queries with existing data. While this will eventually be used for every request, for now it can be used to read data.

(Custom) components 

Besides using the default component set, the Page Builder allows full customization via the Betty Blocks escape hatch. Custom component sets can be made available for reuse, making development even faster in future projects.  

Command Line Interface (CLI) 

The CLI is the command line interface that allows pro-coders to build their own components for the Page Builder. Unlike most tooling we provide, the CLI is reached and operated through the Terminal (MacOSX) or cmd.exe (Windows).