Textual versioned serialization of an app

[Stephen_Ehmann]

Why:

• turbo-charge app development by removing a lot of tedious UI clicking and field entering
• provide a simple interchange format for collaboration and to leverage existing tools for managing and generating text (code)

What is being requested:

• text representation of the app
• serialization format like JSON
• the format of the text representation is versioned with backward compatibility (as possible)
• export from appsheet into this format
• import into appsheet to update an app
  (the Application Documentation is a start, I could scrape it (why can’t this be at least downloadable json??) and produce at text representation myself however anything I do with that text representation cannot be updated into the app)

It would be useful to have a textual representation of an app for these benefits:

• host the app in a standard version control environment like gitlab
• merge changes from multiple developers, use regular version control features
• allows open sourceing the app to share with others and allow them to fork and contribute
• provides a way for people to link to an app that is a simple representation
• provides a way to share a representation of the app, without sharing the actual app
• enables viewing and editing the entire app in one place in a text editor
• allows automated lint checking on the app
• allows the app to be auto-generated
• allows abstractions through generator code modules for common mechanisms and tips and tricks to be injected