The future of Application Lifecycle Management on the Quickbase platform

We know our customers have complex problems to solve. They need a powerful and adaptive toolset to be able to adjust to the surrounding dynamic environment and to eliminate Gray Work. And this is what Quickbase does for them...
 

However, with the level of flexibility and agility that Quickbase provides, there comes the need to oversee and manage the growth of solutions in a scalable way. There is a growing need to have safety processes in place for managing parallel streams of app and workflow development.. Most of all, customers need to ensure the business continuity of their Quickbase solutions. No matter how, when and who is developing anything, the business processes keep running and never get interrupted or distorted by the constantly ongoing change management processes.
 

These needs have been well-known and explored in the traditional software development industry during the last few decades. There are already proven and well-established best practices. Our mission is to apply best practices from traditional software development, adapted to the needs of a business builder in Quickbase.
 

The no-code space has not solved all the ALM challenges in a way that truly works for non-technical users. In Quickbase, we see an opportunity to define what the best-in-class ALM experience for non-technical users looks like.  The main pain points we repeatedly hear from our customers are a lack of: 

• Approval processes around deployments 

• Fine-grained auditing of all deployed changes 

 

To respond to these market needs, we are developing a new API-based framework that enables builders to partner closely with their IT department to satisfy even the most complicated lifecycle needs.

 

How do we plan to solve those problems? 

We are developing a framework, called Solution APIs and a new way to represent the Quickbase schema you are building – QBL (Quickbase specific language). With this framework, we will provide several CRUD (create, read, update, delete) APIs that enable a very high level of flexibility and adjustability to fit any organization's needs.
 

You can see more details about Solutions and related features for example Versioning and Rollback here: https://www.quickbase.com/blog/scaled-solution-management  

About QBL
 

QBL, short for Quickbase Language, is a new way to describe the schema of your Quickbase solutions. Everything you can configure in your apps and pipelines can be represented using natural language. One way to think about it is like a map of your Quickbase solutions – there you can see everything – tables, all their fields, the structure of forms, reports, dashboards, relationships, roles, the structure of a pipeline and all the settings about those items. Here is an example of QBL:
 

 

In this example we can see a few rows of the description of an app that is called “Service Request Production”. You can see the description of the app, the color, the app icon, the set currency, first day of the year etc. If you have built Quickbase apps, you recognize those to be your app settings. 

Here is a similar example for a field, where you can recognize the field type, label and the configurations available for a field type DateTime:
 

 

 

 

At this point you might be wondering how all of this is applicable to you. We believe that the QBL and the Solution APIs are so flexible that they can be used in many use cases.  

A key opportunity we see is the option to integrate Solution APIs with any code Source Control Management (SCM) toolset you have in your organization. SCMs are specifically designed to manage code formats and have a vast array of features to support version control, separated parallel development, role management and so much more. By using Solution APIs with SCMs, you can tap into those capabilities. Some examples of SCM tools are Git, Azure DevOps, Helix and others. 

Learn more about SCM - https://www.turing.com/blog/source-code-management-tools-best-practices/ 

Real-world applications

Business builders can partner with IT teams to leverage this technology to more deeply integrate Quickbase within an org's stack. But that certainly isn't a requirement. While we know the Quickbase community is going to come up with use cases we could never imagine, there are two fundamental ways customers can consume these new APIs. First, using your company source control tools. Second, running Quickbase on Quickbase. 

Here are just a handful of the examples we know you’ll take advantage of: 

SCM: Version control 

You will be able to take advantage of capabilities inbuilt in SCM tools to seamlessly keep a log of every single version deployed – this is what source control tools are designed for. 

SCM: Compare Versions (DIFF)
 

 QBL is built to enable you to compare versions of your Solutions to the smallest detail. SCM tools are very good at highlighting these differences. 

Run "Quickbase on Quickbase”: Dev/Test/Prod - create environments 

With Solution APIs you can unlock a lot of power by creating multiple versions of your Solutions and assign them to be your production, staging, testing and development environments. This can happen by using a sequence of: 

Export QBL of a Solution -> Use Create API with the exported QBL to create a copy solution and assign it for an environment. 

Or you can tap into the flexibility Quickbase offers and manage your APIs and environments with a Quickbase app and Pipelines. The app and pipeline can work together to facilitate the creation of separate environments – the app is the “frontend” where you make the configuration, and a pipeline executes the APIs on the background based on triggers in the app. 

Run “Quickbase on Quickbase”: Dev/Test/Prod - deployments across environments 

Another way you can take advantage of a Quickbase managed set up is to also control the deployments of changes across environments. In an app you can set rules about the directions of deployments (so you eliminate the option to deploy from test directly to prod for example) as well as permissions for users that are allowed or not allowed to execute deployments and even approval steps. 

And this is only the beginning. Here are some other things we heard from builders like you: 

• A use case we call “build once, deploy everywhere”. If you need to re-deploy the same Solution several times – for example for different local units of your business or even for different customers, Solution APIs will give you the perfect opportunity to

  •  instantly replicate the template Solution in the same or a different realm

  • make updates with new developments or fixes in seconds - to all destination Solutions. 

• Something obvious, but it might be important for your organization – mapping and documenting the Quickbase structures and relationships, including internal and external pipelines. We know for some of our customers this is very important. 

 

While Solution APIs are still under development, we are aiming at releasing a limited schema coverage version focused on tables and fields only in early 2024. The first release will enable you to export, import and update your applications properties, your table settings, all field configurations and roles as well as roles permissions over fields and tables. After that we will continue enhancing the coverage of the APIs with forms, reports, dashboards, pipelines and all other Quickbase schema.

We hope you get inspired to think about how you can apply these new tools in your organization and don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or feedback you have. We would love to hear back from you. If you are interested in early access opportunities, more information on the topic or want to share your feedback with us, please don’t hesitate to contact your Quickbase account team or myself at rstoycheva@quickbase.com 

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