We are currently looking into the Agile Platform by Outsystems.
We have went through their courses and did all the examples but from experience these types of things only show part of the picture.
Are there any serious pitfalls that we may not be aware of?
Hey Tom,
I've been using the platform for > 2.5 years now and haven't found any serious shortcomings.
I've been implementing several projects (mostly data management and/or integration type applications) and have been very successful with the platform ...
Feel free to contact me if you have specific questions: http://www.linkedin.com/in/stefanmeier
Cheers, Stefan
I've been using it to put together a project, and I am extremely happy with it. It makes 90% of a project extremely easy; it takes the advantages of an ORM but integrates it beautifully into the development system, the lifecycle is great on a project. I like the deployment/versioning/rollback story. Anything that falls outside of its realm is very easy to handle in Visual Studio using the Integration Studio.
I've found a couple of minor bugs along the way, but I have to say that the support team has been EXTREMELY responsive to them, even though I am an unpaying, "Community Edition" member. The support in the forums, both from OutSystems and from the other users has been outstanding.
The ONLY hitch that I've found, is that it currently is no compatible with .NET 4 and Visual Studip 2008. I've been told that it is on the roadmap. If you have code that must use .NET 4 before they get that support in, you can easily wrap it in a WCF service and import that service directly in Service Studio. This is what I did, and it turned out to be a big benefit since the .NET 4 code was very resource intensive so I now have some scalability options.
Hope this helps!
J.Ja
DISCLAIMER: I work for OutSystems
Every development tool/language/stack/... involves some tradeoffs at some point. Therefore, depending on what you're looking for, or particularly interested in, you may consider some aspect of a platform as an unforgivable pitfall where others might see it as a godsend blessing, or vice-versa. Thus, only by knowing what you really like and what you consider essential, may I try to guess what you'll miss and what you'll consider a pitfall.
Since we usually only notice the lack of something the first time we try to use it, I'd recommend trying to use the platform to hack something at your will without following the tutorials and the courses to the letter. If while creating something different you find anything you dislike, we'll be happy to hear it from you!
TL;DR: If you think the tutorials for a tool aren't showing you something, play with it a bit without following them.