.bubble

What is .bubble ?

.bubble is a new rapid application development technology. ... it is a cross between a programming language, a cloud operating system, a visual design tool, and a PaaS business. The full .bubble stack, includes, AWS infrastructure automation, a PostgreSQL database layer, web servers, a web-based editor (the UI completely built in .bubble), and the .bubble language interpreter, which is implemented in Coffee Script and runs on .bubble's servers and in the user's web browser.

Designing in .bubble

• Drag and drop editor gives you pixel-perfect control
• .bubble apps are responsive and look great in mobile browsers
• No custom HTML or CSS needed to get the design you want
• White-label your app with a custom domain name
• Include images, icons, buttons, maps, video, calendars, and much more… See our collection of 568 plugins, including * Stripe, Google, Facebook, etc.
• Dynamic content: text and images can display user-generated content or data fetched from APIs or other services
• Conditionality: change the font, color or visibility of anything on the page based on what's going on in the app
• Define app-wide styles to keep a coherent design and easily maintain your app

Why choose .bubble ?

• Launch sooner. Translating a design into a working application in .bubble is much faster than traditional development.
• Iterate faster. Anyone on the team can make changes, not just developers.
• Lower costs. Building out an in-house engineering team generally requires a six figure annual budget for even small organizations.
• Traditional programming is costly and time-intensive. It can be weeks or months for a development team to go from design to a working application. .bubble closes the gap between creating the design and seeing it come to life by making development faster and easier.
• Often, hiring developers is a major bottleneck for starting a new project. .bubble is easy enough for total beginners to use, so that teams don’t have to invest in technical talent prior to getting started. It's powerful enough to build fully-functional and scalable apps, and it's extensible via Javascript plugins and APIs.

.bubble vs. code

• .bubble is designed to replace programming languages and frameworks traditionally used for web development. It replaces back-end technologies such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and PHP, as well as front-end technologies such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
• Unlike those technologies, .bubble makes some assumptions about what you want to build. Specifically, it assumes that you're building a multi-user interactive application for web or mobile. This lets us make things easier for you in three ways.
• .bubble is a higher-level language. In traditional languages, you work with low-level concepts such as clients, servers, databases, data models, and html templating. In .bubble, you work with high-level concepts such as * show this button”, “send an email”, and “turn this font color red.”
• .bubble uses clicks, not code. In traditional languages, you work in text documents, and it’s up to you to know what to type. In contrast, .bubble lets you design your page using a visual editor, and write the logic of your application with a click-based system that prompts you with suggestions, so you’re never at a loss for what to type next.
• .bubble handles deployment and hosting for you. Working in a traditional language, you generally need to manage your code and set up a deployment process to a web server. With .bubble, this all happens behind the scenes: .bubble is meant as a comprehensive, batteries-included solution for web development. Creating a new app is as simple as clicking “New application,” and deploying it is as simple as clicking “Deploy to live.”
• Although it doesn’t feel like one, .bubble is a real programming language. You can build arbitrarily deep logical expressions, chain together conditional logic, and store data. Although you can theoretically do anything in .bubble that you would do in code, .bubble is designed to be efficient to write business and display logic, not mathematically-complex algorithms or novel UI interactions. .bubble seamlessly integrates with Javascript via plugins, and we recommend using Javascript for expressing mathematically-complicated formulas, or building game-like or non-web-native visual interactions.

.bubble vs. website builders

• There are many tools out there that let you build a website without knowing HTML. Well-known ones include Wordpress, Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy.
• Most of these tools will let you do things like make different pages, upload images and media, create a blog, build a form, or make a shopping cart.
• What these tools generally don't do is give you control over your application's flow and design. Let’s say you’re building a photo sharing website and you want your users to upload a photo, then select some friends to send it to. After that, you want an email to go to those friends, which should include a link they can click on to rate the photo.
• In website builders, something like this would be impossible. There might be a photo upload plugin, but you're stuck with however that plugin works... If it doesn't support emailing friends and asking for ratings, you're out of luck!
• That's where .bubble comes in... .bubble gives you complete control over exactly what happens on your website. You can define custom categories of data (like “ratings” or “photos”), you can take actions such as sending an email or connecting to Facebook, and you can specify situation-specific logic (“if the photo's rating is greater than 3, make this headline red...”).
• Website builders are great for what they are: we recommend using them if what you want to do matches up with their capabilities. For everything else, though, there's .bubble!

What can I build ?

• .bubble lets you build interactive, multi-user apps for both desktop and mobile web browsers. Some of our users have had success using third-party tools to wrap .bubble websites as native apps that can be submitted to the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, and we plan to fully support native apps in the future.
• .bubble is open-ended; like in a traditional programming language, there's no fixed set of possibilities.

.bubble supports

• real-time multi-user interactions
• saving, sharing, and searching for user-created content
• getting data from and sending data to external APIs
• communicating through mediums including email and social networks
• working with media such as photos and videos
• charging credit cards and making payments

Things you can build include (but are not limited to...)

• A real-time voting app
• A video-sharing social network
• A Craigslist-esque marketplace
• A turn-based storytelling game

What can't I build with .bubble ?

• .bubble is very open-ended. By combining different data and logic operations, you can create very simple to extremely complicated applications.
• That said, there are some limits to what the core language can do. .bubble’s language is comparable in power to spreadsheet formulas: you can do a lot, but anything requiring recursive or looping operations on data (such as, for instance, writing a custom machine-learning algorithm) would be easier to write in a traditional programming language.
• The good news is that .bubble is fully extensible via Javascript plugins. The .bubble model is to write the core website functionality using our super-simple language, and plug in Javascript to handle algorithms that are hard to build on .bubble.

.bubble vs native android/ios app

• Right now, .bubble apps work best in a web browser (though our community has successfully built native mobile apps). .bubble makes it easy to build animations, but right now isn't really suited for building anything that involves a lot of dynamic graphics e.g. platform games.

Do .bubble apps work on mobile ?

• .bubble ships with a responsive design engine that automatically translates your app to any screen size. You can tweak the way it gets displayed to get the exact look you want.
• .bubble also supports designating specific mobile pages that appear to mobile visitors automatically, in place of your desktop page.
• Although we don’t yet support native apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play store, there are several options:
• Our community has had success using tools such as Phonegap or Gonative to automatically turn Bubble mobile web apps into native apps. We recommend asking on the forum.
• .bubble makes it easy to rapidly create powerful APIs. Building a mobile app using Bubble as the backend is significantly faster than developing a custom backend, and a mobile app using a Bubble-built API can access the exact same data as your web application.

What can I connect to ?

• .bubble has pre-built integrations with hundreds of popular services, including social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn), analytics (Mixpanel), and payments (Stripe). See the complete list here.
• Our no-code API connector lets you hook up to any JSON or XML based API without having to know any programming, and supports most popular authentication protocols out of the box. We also support connecting to major SQL databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MS SQL.
• The .bubble platform is entirely open. You can create custom plugins using Javascript, and expose your own API to let other services connect to you.
• .bubble handles scaling your app automatically behind the scenes. You can purchase additional server capacity with a single click, with no need to worry about provisioning servers or databases in advance. Our shared infrastructure is designed to dynamically allocate resources as needed to support web-scale applications, and we also offer dedicated hosting solutions for apps with custom requirements.
• There are no hard limits on the number of users, volume of traffic, or amount of data you want to store. We support your growth from baby MVP to grown-up internet-wide phenomenon.

.bubble is headquartered in New York City, New York USA and works out of a co-working space in Manhattan.