Max Katz

For the past couple of months we have been working on a really exciting project. We are re-creating the Tiggzi app builder in HTML5 and JavaScript. The current version is pretty slick and many people ask us if that’s JavaScript, but all you need to do is to right-click and you will that Tiggzi uses Flash/Flex.

You might be wondering why would we use Flash? Tiggzi was started some time ago. We actually started with a simple cloud-based web prototyping tool, then moved to mobile prototyping and then made it an actual cloud-based app builder. When we were starting, Flash was the best technology to achieve the functionality we wanted. We couldn’t have achieved the same feature set with HTML and JavaScript.

A few months ago we have realized that Flash wasn’t helping us any more, in fact, it was slowing and complicating development. Adding new features became difficult. It was slow, loading the Flash player and the project could sometime take over one minute. Not to mention that Flash has been slowly reaching the end of life.

A few months ago we started recreating the app builder portion in HTML5 and JavaScript. I personally can’t wait for the HTML5/JavaScript version to be released — it’s really awesome! The project is super interesting but also pretty challenging. Why challenging? Well, because no one out there (to my knowledge) has attempted to create a visual, drag and drop app builder using HTML5 and JavaScript. There are JavaScript-based code editors and there are some visual tools for building the UI — but no tool combines building the UI, adding REST API services, visual data binding, and testing into one service. Plus, you will have integration with Tiggzi Backend Services.

Here is a very (very) early version of the HTML5 app builder, most everything will change before it is released in the fall: