Is this sort of stuff turning application development into a commodity?
You can spin up a Rails app, Bootstrap it, and them theme it off the shelf with about 30 minutes work nowadays. 10 minutes later you can have it running on a PAAS such as Heroku.
Each of those jobs would have taken a number of different specialists many days in development, design, and sys admin work just a few years ago.
The average simple CRUD SAAS app that is presented here is such a low barrier to entry and becoming increasingly so.
It depends. Is it good that I don't need to know how to get an Apache server on a *NIX box up and running just so I can play with Ruby? Absolutely.
Is it good that even though I suck as UI design & colors, I can see something I like, drop a little cash and deploy it? Again absolutely.
Is it good that it's now super easy to write a CRUD app that is nothing more than a digitized form? I'm not sold here.
I get the allure, and I take advantage of these options as much as possible. But what I want to see is software helping solve a problem. If all you're doing is digitizing a form, I'm not convinced you've really solved a problem.
The entire internet is a CRUD app filled with digitized forms. It is nice not to have to think about that, and instead think about workflows and affordances that help people get stuff done. Making this basic crud easier allows more brain space for the more interesting problems to solve.
True, my concern is more that people will just stop with the CRUD app.
Geocities did some good for letting people having their own page. But the HTML was horrendous, and left many thinking they're doing amazing stuff. I don't really want to see that repeated.
The problem, however, is at the developer level and not the tool level, I suppose.
I wouldn't worry about people "stopping". As long as companies have use-it-or-lose-it budgets, they'll find a way to spend the money somewhere.
And as for geocities, untrained people putting content out there for the rest of the world to see was pretty amazing stuff at the time, even without semantic web concepts in place.
You can spin up a Rails app, Bootstrap it, and them theme it off the shelf with about 30 minutes work nowadays. 10 minutes later you can have it running on a PAAS such as Heroku.
Each of those jobs would have taken a number of different specialists many days in development, design, and sys admin work just a few years ago.
The average simple CRUD SAAS app that is presented here is such a low barrier to entry and becoming increasingly so.