A while ago, i was contacted by Ted Haeger of Bungee Labs in response to my blog entry on Heroku. He invited me to check out Bungee Connect, their fully featured web-based IDE. So i did.

Keep in mind that the following overview is of the Beta version, which is still under development and so is still subject to change. Also remember that this is in no way an in-depth review.

For those who don’t know, Bungee Connect is an all-inclusive web development environment. It covers development, testing, and publishing of web applications. In addition, a collaborative element is introduced with support for multiple users.

Development

So here’s the development environment, which has a striking resemblance to a certain Intergrated Development Environment from another company.

Naturally, the first thing anyone would want to do is make a simple “Hello World” application, which sounds very simple at first – right? Wrong!

Sadly there is quite a big learning curve getting to grips with Bungee’s terminology and workflow.

As you’ll note by looking at the screen shot, the hierarchy for my “Hello World” application looks like this:

• Yo_World
  • MyAppProject
    • NewPage
  • MyTypeLib
    • Yo_World
      • Object

Which to me, seems a bit overcomplicated.

Bungee Connect is not the sort of development environment where you can just pick it up and churn out a working application without first reading the documentation.

Still, with a lot of head bashing you could probably think of the above as an example of MVC (Model, View, Controller). i.e. “MyAppProject” is where the views go, and “MyTypeLib” is where all of the controllers go.

For the actual code, it seems primarily based on Java or CSharp. Though i couldn’t find this explicitly stated anywhere, so i am not sure.

One of the key features which sets this solution apart from other web-based development environments is the GUI designer. It can be very much likened to Visual Studio – there’s a control palette on the left, object inspector on the bottom, and you can move about controls in a WYSIWG-style canvas.

Another thing of note is that you can bind values of controls to counterparts in control objects. This means that you can easily build up complex interfaces without writing tonnes of glue code, which can save a lot of time. If you have ever used Interface Builder on a mac, you’ll probably know what i mean.

Staging & Deployment

Assuming you made it through the development process, it’s likely you’ll want to subject your application to rigourous testing and eventually publish it to Bungee Connect’s servers for public consumption.

That is, after you accept no more than 3 long and wordy license agreements, which to say the least was a big legal commitment for such a service. I might not have been bothered if there were only 2, but 3? Also factor in the additional Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. That makes 5. Crazy!

It should also be noted that you are locked into deploying your application on Bungee Connect’s servers.

Conclusion

Enough rambling. So is Bungee Connect any good? Well at the moment, not really. I say this because it just seems like an overly complicated solution for a rather simple problem. While I want to “Build the app, not the crap”, it would be nice if i could “Not deal with the crap”.

The “Crap” i refer to includes:

• Complicated licensing
• Steep learning curve (terminology, process, quirks)
• Buggy interface (e.g. drag & drop didn’t work at all in Safari!)

Bungee’s statement, “Build the app, not the crap” got me thinking. When was the last time i really thought i was building the app, not the crap?

Yes, Delphi. Hello World? Just stick a label on the default project’s form, type “Hello World”, and press run. It couldn’t be any simpler.

Compare and contrast with Bungee Connect: I have to make a “TypeLib”, a controller, then a form. Then if i am lucky i might figure out which item in which list is the form, drag over a label, type “Hello World”, and then stick it all on the page in my other project.

I really do wonder, why can’t modern web-based web application development be simple and fun?