I’ve not done a lot of front end. I used pilot, made a react app, playing around with it. I saw what could be done and said workshop is dead.
It made me appreciate front end and web dev so much more.
This is my apology form
Workshop is solid. I recently started training on it, and before that I worked with Microsoft Power Apps. Back then, Microsoft was pushing low-code/no-code pretty hard, this was all prior to LLM coding agents.
Today, if possible, I think people should try building web apps directly in Foundry. With Foundry handling the backend, data, and security, I can focus on designing a clean, modern UI, which I find harder to do in Workshop.
The agent features in Foundry via VS Code also look promising. That said, I think Workshop will continue to be popular for users who don’t want to manage repositories. On my team, many Deployment Strategists prefer Workshop so they can focus on showcasing what Foundry can do, rather than worrying about repo management.
Not yet.. the capabilities and consistency still outclass pilot in a few ways, but obviously the speed of dev can be ridiculous with Pilot. Also, you should give AI-FDE + Pilot a spin.. does better managing the context on Enterprise sized Pilot solutions (and way better at creating Object Types + Actions). Would love to see a happy medium/hybrid of Pilot and Workshop more than anything.. was hoping that’s where Custom Widgets was going but I feel like that’s kinda hard without some way to have universal object type inputs.
I think after the release of osdk/react I am much less frustrated. It’s not enough I will issue an apology form to osdk itself, but it has grown on me.
I think workshop + widgets will be a great starting point.
That being said, there is value of using a framework like React vs Workshop: the former is a commodity skill. So you don’t need as much specialized understanding for workshop.
Oh okie, so after some time working / learning, I see what you mean now.
Currently, I’m experimenting with using custom widget to build solutions. I agree that workshop is really nice in regard to getting the data to work.
Currently, trying to use custom function, and custom widget and workshop, but I feel like the 3 tools is a pain haha.
Also, I hate handling variables in workshop. It’s a massive pain; my current strategy is to shift as much calculations as possible to custom function so I can manage the variables there as much as I can. If there are senior members who have good tips to do this, please let me know! I can’t tell if it’s because I am a novice builder or if workshop variable is difficult to manage.
You have it nailed my friend. Welcome.
In all seriousness, check out on the top left of Workshop the lineage graph for the ins and outs of your variables. That is a new-ish feature they added which helps track.
Workflow builder also helps you map your dependencies between workshop, functions, objects, updates, etc.
But the patterns you are doing are the same ones I ended up doing and it made me so much less frustrated.
That’s partially why I was curious if I should do React. I’m currently on that journey and soon maybe I will reach a higher state of consciousness again.