My name is Gal Oppenheimer and I'm a Product Manager at raw engineering, the company behind
built.io.
Today we're here to talk about planning the structure of your application.
What are the steps to building an app?
First, you plan the structure of your app, second, you build the data structure in a
backend, third, you build the frontend to your application, fourth, you integrate the
frontend and the backend of your application, and now, you're ready to go live!
The structure of your application is basically a giant database and the database is like
a spreadsheet.
Let's take a look at this use case for tracking, managing, and reordering inventory.
A class is a structure for your information.
In this case, there's inventory, employees, customers.
The fields are the pieces of information in your class: item, category, and quantity.
An objects are the different instances, so in this case, the rows.
Tequila, oysters, tea lights, and more.
And just like in more advanced spreadsheets, you can create relationships between these
different sheets, or between these classes.
Let's take a look at a few other examples.
First, there's a conference application.
It has features like speakers, sessions, tracks, events, and maps.
All of these are different classes, and they have relationships.
A session may have five or six speakers if it's a panel.
A track may have eight sessions to it, and an event may have seven tracks.
This event obviously has a map associated with the layout of the room, but it may have
three or four maps, or there may be three or four events that all use the same map.
Another example is purchases and transactions.
Each of these have details such as location, since you need to know where you made your
purchase, receipt details, such as who you're cashier was, what the time was, what register
you are at.
There is also a list of items you purchased, if any of them were on sale, or what color
you got, what department it was purchased from.
All of these are fields within your object.
You could also have rewards, so you may have a separate class tracking what reward level
the user is at, and they may be able to receive a ten percent off coupon for their entire
purchase.
That would be it's own class and it would have its own object for every user.
You may not realize it, but you've just built the structure of your application.
You've just figured out what your classes are, what fields they'll have, and how your
classes relate to one and other.
You can now get started building your application on a backend.
Want to learn more about built.io, where you can also build your application?
Get started by creating an account at built.io/signup.
Once you've done that, check out the developer documentation and community.
If you have any questions, shoot an email to support@built.io.
Thank you!
Have a great day.