Recently, the American "open source software" project Openbiz has released a new PHP application development tool called Openbiz Cubi Dev, which claims to allow developers to create a fully functional enterprise-level application in 3 minutes through configuration and wizards. . Whether this is groundless or a revelation, let us wait and see.
Hands-on experience: First contact with Openbiz
After the author downloaded the development installation package, I found that it provides an automatic deployment tool that can run under Windows. Following the official installation video tutorial, it was easy to install it locally. Entering my local operating environment is the further database configuration wizard and initialization system wizard. The first impression is that the interface style is very fresh and completely different from the "unsightly" look of open source software in the past. It feels more like a mature commercial software style.
After logging in, I saw a feature-rich management panel according to the prompts, including basic system elements such as users, roles, and groups. In other words, if I develop a program based on Openbiz Cubi, then there is no need to divide user permissions and session management. I am reconsidering and just develop my related applications directly on top of the already perfect system architecture. This management panel also provides many advanced function settings, such as caching, automatic backup, secure firewall, multi-language translation, and themes. switch. There are also recently popular modules such as social login, payment integration, and text messaging.
It is worth mentioning here that, as officially announced by Openbiz, this time it is mainly optimized for users in mainland China. We can see the shadows of Sina Weibo, Tencent, Taobao, and Alipay in the list of social networks, as well as There is payment integration with Alipay, as well as multiple domestic SMS gateway service providers.
When performing further initialization settings, we can also see the convenient and practical "Novice Guide" carefully designed by the manufacturer. In addition to being very convenient for operators like me to figure out the ropes, I can also develop new applications myself. The program can also reuse this function to provide users with a getting started guide, which will alleviate a lot of after-sales service work.
Perhaps you think I haven’t done anything yet, but in fact, 30% of my development work has been completed, yes! Because functions such as user management and role management are already available. By simply setting the default properties, we've set these reusable features to the pattern I need.
A little test: use it to make a data management system
Now let’s take a look at the real development tools of this development environment. The legendary weapon appears.
It is Openbiz Appbuilder 2.0 which was not released until November.
It looks cool! It mainly includes a new application creation wizard, a module connection wizard and a metadata visual editor. Let's try it out with the application creation wizard. The first thing we see is the beautiful and interesting welcome interface as shown below.
Click "Next" and follow the wizard step by step to enter and select the information you want to use, including which database to use, which table to use, which fields to create, and which advanced features to enable. Here we have chosen a data table that I created in advance, which includes all the fields required by my data system, such as gender, age, student status and other information. Fill in the descriptions and information groupings for them in the new application wizard of Appbuilder.
Then set whether to enable some advanced features for these data. For example, attributes such as attachments and pictures can be added to each piece of information, and category management is enabled for the information, allowing different custom extension fields to be set for each category. As shown below.
Then continue to the next step and complete!
That’s right, the program I want has been developed without typing a single line of code, in an incredible way. It seems that all the development work is focused on thinking about the data table structure and implementing some advanced features other than "add, delete, modify and check". For example, when a piece of information is created, an email or SMS notification is automatically sent. Only then do you need to write a few lines. code.
These automatically generated codes are different from what we expected. They are not PHP source codes. But more than 90% of XML files. These XML files only describe data mapping relationships and business logic relationships, but do not contain business logic implementation code at all. This should be the metadata programming idea proposed by Openbiz.
The advantage of this is that if we need to maintain or modify the program in the future, such as adding some fields, we do not need to modify a large amount of program source code as before, but only need to update these simple and easy-to-understand programs. XML file.
The code example is shown in the picture below
Functional testing: This is a moment to witness a miracle
This newly generated program has a default interface that looks very fresh. The overall operation interface can be said to be integrated with the theme style of Openbiz Cubi. All the advanced features of the system are such as data navigation on the list page and search. Auto-suggestions and dynamic column-sorting of results are all features our new program supports. If you are not someone who has come into contact with Openbiz, you will definitely think that this is an exquisite detail that I spent several weeks completing.
Having introduced so much, how does it feel to use this automatically generated program? We did the following tests and got satisfactory results:
l Create a profile entry
l Edit a data entry and comment on this modification
l Delete one or more data entries
l Add multiple related pictures to a certain information item
l Add multiple related file attachments to a data entry
l Hide a data entry from someone
l Hand over a data entry to someone for management and maintenance (only he can edit it, others can only view it)
l Submit a certain data entry to a certain department for management and maintenance (only people from that department can edit it)
l Set other data related to a certain data link
Wow, this is the data management software I want to make! It’s unbelievable that so many functions are automatically created in a few mouse clicks. Finally, modify it to belong to "My Works", which is also my favorite feature. Look at the picture below:
Replace the logo, replace the header, and make it look like it was completely made for this application. This function is so user-friendly. There is no need to modify the underlying source files. The manufacturer directly creates a UI for you to modify.
For the rest, drink a cup of coffee and wait to meet with the leader. Look at the watch, is it really less than 3 minutes? In other words, writing this program is at least much easier than writing this article.
This thing has a great background
Openbiz is an open source project launched in 2003, which means that if you feel that something is not good enough, you can directly modify the source code to improve it without being constrained by the underlying restrictions. This is completely different from using other commercial frameworks such as Java and .Net Framework. And after 9 years of continuous improvement, I believe its connotation is far more than the superficial indications we have seen.
Due to limited space, we cannot introduce all the features of Openbiz Cubi Dev one by one to readers who support us. There are more functions and techniques waiting for you to explore.
Text: PHPchina
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