Now that nocode development is all the rage, I was curious to experience and rewview Honeycode after AWS announced it’s Beta release.
The first indication of the types of apps that would be possible glared at me from the top of the features page:
Prepare app data in tables: First, set up data that your app will use in a Honeycode table. You can import data from CSV files or get a head start using a template.
It would be nice if the tables are at least something like CSV files on S3 which are also accesible by Athena or by simply reading or writing an updated CSV file to the S3 Bucket.
I dug a bit further and discovered that there is no support from reading from or writing to API’s.
In terms of other features, I was able to add and use formulas in the tables like you would in a spreadsheet for calculating new values. You can also create multiple tables with relationships - for example for lookup lists. You can also use authenticated AWS user accounts to share and manage access.
It is possible to setup simple workflows and trigger events with the Automations feature.
Right now it seems that Honeycode is in the same realm as other –“click an app together based on a spreadsheet”– like Open As App or Microsoft’s PowerApps, although both of those are much further along, and offer more features.
So while Honeycode is still beta, it will be interesting to see how it evolves.
