Visual Lambdas Update: Higher-Level Blocks and Multi-User Collaboration

[svenhaiges]

As our research around low code programming and visual lambdas comes to an end, I wanted to outline the latest features added to our block-based visual lambda editor via this blog post. Please also have a look at the other blog posts around low code, visual programming here.

These are the new features:

• There's now a basic overview page showing all the visual lambdas as part of the Kyma Console. From this overview page, you can easily jump into editing a lambda or delete one. You can also create a new lambda, which automagically will of course create all required k8s resources such as deployments, services or Kyma APIs to expose the visual lambda.


• The blockly-based visual editor got a face lift: it's now using a different renderer which results in a more compact block representation, also the blocks got split into their categories such as Kyma (for all lambda-related core & lower level blocks) or the new "cart" category. The latter one now includes fairly high-level, business-user style blocks.


• When it comes to the new blocks, the focus of the last 2 weeks was on business user relevancy. So new blocks include:
  
  
  
  • loop over all items of a cart
  
  
  • add a product to the cart
  
  
  
  
  
  
  • get/set a property of a cart item
  
  
  • check for the stock level of a product
  
  
  • limit the cart item quantity to a number specified (which logically is an if/else block combined with a cart item set if the condition matches)
  
  
  • check if a product is contained in a cart
  
  
  • a few other smaller blocks such as convenience blocks to access a carts total value, etc.
  
  
  
  


• Finally, we've added a cool collaboration feature - multiple users can open the same lambda simultaneously and can collaborate on the creation of the lambda. While this is definitely very explorative at this point, I think it opens opens up some new thinking and unlocks some creativity as to where this may go in the future.

Below are two examples of visual lambdas - both with cart/commerce related use cases. Do you think a business user would be able to create these visual lambdas? I hope your answer is also: Yes!

Use Case: if a certain product is contained in the cart, automatically add another product.

Use Case: as long as there is stock for a certain product, add it to each cart.

Again, I've pulled all these updates also into a quick screen recording, have a look and please let me know what feedback you have!