First of all - I am deeply impressed by how Aware IM enables users like me to come up with business applications.
The combination of rules, processes, notifications and documents etc. offer superb options for creating such applications.
Especially concerning the rules language it takes some time to get into it and I am still far away from really “know what I am doing”. But that’s just fine.

I did a lot of research concerning RAD tools to develop applications and did test quite a lot of them – Aware IM is still on top of things for my specifications.

Nevertheless - there are some things, which make me think, whether Aware IM will be the right solution or how much time, effort and customization will be needed to extend Aware IM they way I would like it to be:

First: Combine Aware IM Data centric apps with CRM functionality

What I would be really interested in are some experiences and approaches, when it comes to applications, that are not only data focused and would need a different frontend UI and a better way of handling contents like blog posts with images, videos, HTML5-animations, slideshows etc…

A combination of a data application with a CMS or a content rich Knowledge-Management-System/Self-Service-Portal would be simply awesome.

I experimented with the custom presentation options and the possibilities offered by HTML-attributes etc. , but this seems to be too much of a workaround and it´s quite hard to keep the same appearance for different presentations / HTML-attributes.

Does anyone have experiences, when it comes to integrate applications created with AwareIM with some sort of CMS, like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla etc. or “Knowledge Management Systems”?

Second: Ajax support in frontend
Is there any “how to guide” / example, of how to enable Ajax functionality in the frontend?

Validation and execution of rules after User Input, without the need to hit “Save”.

In the forum I read suggestions to use processes for this approach, but again – this is some sort of workaround and it would be great to have this more straight forward.

I saw the information in the UserGuide (or one of the other documents), but as a non developer I still wouldn´t know how to use the XML-output and where to hook it on.

Third: Frontend UI-components / More frontend UI controll

This is related to the first concern – I would like to have more flexibility, when it comes to frontend UI controls.
Things like sliders, toggles, switches, accordions, drag&drop functionalities etc.

I know – some stuff is already implemented, but it would be great to implement more frontend UI controls.

The questions is – what options would I have?

I saw the forum topic “Cool stuff with CSS3”, and did some testing with that. If you find the right CSS/HTML based components and figure out a way to implement this in your application, you get some nifty things done.

But when doing research of available CSS3 and/or HTML5-based UI-sets and then tried to implement those in my application it again felt like a workaround and not like something which offers great flexibility – especially if you are up to let your frontend user configure a lot of stuff for themselves in a SaaS kind of manner, where they get the different applications but still have to configure them to their nees.

Fourth: HTML5 & CSS3 Mobile Applications

It´s a really nice feature of Aware IM to be able to check for “mobile compatibility” to come up with mobile version of an application.

But I am really missing the “work offline” kind of option for mobile applications. It would be great to be able to synchronize data (both ways) between a mobile device and an web based online account.

And once again – more flexibility how to present data and content to the mobile user in terms of UI controls.

And of course the option the have the app as a “native” app, which can be send to Google Play and Apples App Store.

Does anyone have suggestions for a solution, which closes this gab when it comes to mobile applications? I mean – using a different RAD mobile application tool and connect the app with the app build with Aware IM.

I know I am looking for some sort of “one does it all” kind of thing, in German we would call that the “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau”.

But as Aware IM already got so many powerful features, together with an reasonable pricing AND, which I really appreciate, the option to have this whole thing on own servers I am really kind of stuck, how to make the right decision for a tool, which will be the base for a platform, which will contain quite a lot of apps with different functionality.

Maybe you guys can add in your approaches/solutions/ideas/whatever to my issues above.

All the best,
OpenEyes