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Business Catalyst Not Quite the Powerhouse I'd Thought
A while back I was singing the praises quite loudly and publicly for a product called Business Catalyst. This nicely engineered tool designed to allow Web designers to develop the business interactions necessary to building business solutions without programming had started as a smallish product from a tiny startup in Australia but two years ago was purchased by Adobe Systems.
I'm not a big fan of Adobe, after watching how they screwed up firs GoLive then Dreamweaver in successive acquisitions of great products that languished or deteriorated under their confused leadership. But I was pretty impressed with what it seemed they had done with Business Catalyst.
Now, a few months and hundreds of hours of experience later, I'm a bit jaded. I still think Business Catalyst is a great tool, don't get me wrong. But it isn't quite what it's cracked up to be. The biggest gaping hole I've found so far is in the app's claim that it allows the creation of "Web Apps" entirely within its programmerless framework. That would be the Holy Grail for many of us. Alas, when Adobe says BC can build "Web Apps" what it really means is that it can build ultra-simple, single-table database interfaces which, will eminently useful, are well short of the expectations of anyone who has built any Web apps in other more technologically sophisticated platforms and frameworks.
I'm less annoyed by the lack of capability than I am by the disingenuousness of their use of the term Web App. One wag who is either with the company or an unabashed defender of All Things Adobe said this was allowable because "Nobody can really define the term 'Web App' anyway." I think the Wikipedia article on the subject offers some useful insights, including the notion that a Web app shouldn't subject its users to frequent page reloads because of a server query, and the support for such desktop-app functionality as drag-and-drop, to name two. The so-called "Web apps" you can build in BC don't meet either of those simple criteria, let alone the more exacting expectations that I'm sure most if not all users would impose on an experience labeled a "Web app" as opposed to a "Web site."
At the end of the day if you are faced with building a Web app in the sense everyone but Adobe uses the phrase, BC won't be of any use. You might as well use conventional HTML5 and/or HTML/CSS/JavaScript with a dash of PHP or Python.
