You’re going to realize something that you maybe won’t expect after you start using Form.io.
It happened to me. It’s probably going to happen to you. I’ll get to this in a second.
Maybe it was the form-building that initially attracted you or perhaps just the form management itself or the data management, but for one reason or another, here you are.
When you start using the Developer Portal, the main tool in the Form.io platform, you’re likely going to build a form, with drag and drop of course.
That’s the part you will expect: quickly building the UI elements for the front-end. That’s the first of the 3 tools.
But right away, you will also see Resources.
They look like forms and they act like forms—because they ARE forms, all the way down to the bottom. The only difference is their name and how we classify them.
What are they for?
They are the mechanism, the structure, and the UI for building out your database infrastructure.
You see, a form isn’t just a good user-interface element for collecting data. They are ideal structures for reigning in unstructured data (MongoDB).
I was talking about this just the other day. The form as a UI element enables you to model your data visually.
So in addition to building the front-end UI itself, you are using the exact same tool to build your backend.
And mapping a form to a resource is as simple as selecting the resource you’ve created in a drop down box—2 clicks. That’s the second of the 3 tools.
The third is the database itself, which is MongoDB, for all the benefits of NoSQL. That’s the third of the 3 tools.
Now, you might be thinking “But we use SQL for this, that, and the other,” and maybe also “And we have no plans to change that.”
No problem.
Here’s the thing. We understand that you might have some systems, even some old systems, that you probably don’t want to touch. Form.io can augment your existing systems, a data supplement so to speak.
We’ve built a SQL Connector to make it easy to read data in SQL systems so you don’t have to go messing around in that 20-year-old ERP.
All of this is one deployment with one of our enterprise licenses, sent to you in a Docker container already wired in and ready to go.
Of course you’re going to want to try it first.
There are two options.
- You can explore our SaaS tool and begin immediately.
- You can deploy our Open Source libraries which includes the form renderer as well so you can render JSON forms in your apps. Not all features are available in open source (e.g. SQL Connector) and you’ll have to wire it up, but the core components are all there.
So what’s the thing you’re going to realize that you didn’t expect?
That Form.io, at first glance, is not what you thought it was. It’s a lot more under the hood.
“Simply mind blowing from a capability perspective.”
“Form.IO concept is simple but is a very thoughtful and powerful tool that helps in accelerating the development of software applications.”
“Very secure, easy and fast to setup compared to a traditional database and backend. As a developer and entrepreneur, I can easily build MVPs and get to market faster than competition. With its very user-friendly drag and drop tools, one can easily build screens and at the same time build the backend infrastructure all in one pass. The APIs that gets generated are available to you soon as you click ‘save’. Just like that you can blaze through the building of your infrastructure with just a few clicks. Front-end, back-end and database all found in one solution. I am an engineer but I definitely would think you won’t have to be one to be able to use this. This service definitely would give companies, especially startups a very significant boost when trying to get solutions out the door. Oh, and they have really good customer service and tech support!”