About Olympe
This is a copy of the Learn Olympe interactive book. It is on the support website for convenience.
To see the original version how it was mean to be, please follow this link: Learn Olympe
What is Olympe?
Before jumping right into business, let's talk a bit about Olympe. We cannot use a product without a little understanding of its purposes and uses.
If you are a company or want to use Olympe on a company level, you may want to check the official Olympe.io website, as everything is explained there. Here I will take a more single-person-using-Olympe-to-develop approach to the topic.
First things first, Olympe is a company, based in Switzerland, that develops a product called... Olympe. Yes not the most clear 😄 The product is actually divided in two worlds: DRAW and CODE, both are not separated, but work together.
DRAW is kind of a composer that allows to build application in a visual way. It can be the actual aspect of it, but also it's logic, data and to some extends its backends too.
Instead of being a pure no-code platform, Olympe is a low-code one, that is where CODE enters into action. CODE allows the user to extend the possibilities of DRAW by using Javascript or Typescript (or any language compatible with Javascript).
In addition to DRAW and CODE, Olympe also provides the full infrastructure support needed for hosting, customizing, maintaining and scaling your application. I won't go too in-depth on this topic for now, we will see that in a later chapter!
What can I do with it?
Almost any application that comes to mind can be done with Olympe, from a simple landing page of a small business, to complex inter-systems composition, and everything in between. Let's list some non-exhaustive examples:
- A TODO-list app to help you manage your tasks
- A landing page for your uncle pottery workshop
- A blog for posting your next travel pictures and thoughts
- A form to help your buyers handle purchase requests
- A dashboard application that centralise all your company legacy systems
- A online game where players battle with various pieces on a 8x8 board
- A REST-API for managing multiple databases at once
- And so on...
Basically anything that can be done with HTML/CSS/Javascript/Node can be done with Olympe, but in a much faster way. Because Olympe allows for quick iteration loop, easy collaboration with end-users and rapid deployment.
Also Olympe has a ever-growing Marketplace that accelerate the building process with DRAW. And if something missing? Let's add it with CODE 😉
How does it work?
I don't want to go too in-depth here, as there is a lot to cover, and everything will be explained in the chapters 😜
I plan to create a synthesis of it but it is not ready yet.
What are the advantages of learning it?
For everything that was already said, and also because it's fun! Olympe brings a complete new approach to development. Easily pickable for beginners, rich and powerful for advanced users. Even if you are not sure if you will use it or not, I recommand you to check the first chapters out, maybe you will still discover why this low-code platform is so interesting!
Check out also the Olympe.io website for more information about its capabilities and features.
Why should I not use Olympe?
Even if Olympe, with DRAW/CODE being by essence a programing language, allows you to do almost any application. It is not suited for all usages. The main target application are web application, so even if Olympe supports PWA, if your application is a heavy performance desktop application, you may want to use another language (like C/C++ in this case).
As everything in development, it is often the use cases that dictate the solution to use ☝️ Still, knowing Olympe when having to make such decision can be a great asset.
More info
To get more info you can check the following resources (available in the top-right menu):