What’s New at Cardstack?

We have big plans for 2020: The Cardstack Builder and the new project roadmap

Meet the Cardstack Builder: The Ultimate Card Building Tool

The Cardstack Builder is the product that makes the full-stack Cardstack Experience possible. It provides a user interface containing all the card concepts, data models, front-end and back-end code needed to build an application up from parts — as a regular user without coding skills! All the coding work done by framework engineers and Web developers finally empowers the millions of people who don’t code, but who know how to use Excel and configure SaaS software for their needs. As these users apply our off-the-shelf tools, they don’t see any of the programming aspects that are happening in the background. They can construct a real working app on their own, by simple dragging and dropping, and use it immediately.

If they like, they can ask engineers with JavaScript and Web development skills to customize their app further, e.g. by connecting it to an existing accounting system, extending functionalities, building them a new booking module, or adding themes. But they will never have to hire a developer to build them an entire app from scratch again.

What’s even more exciting: These cards (which are mini-apps) can be used not only as cards, but as embeddable fields as well. For example, you could simply drag a beautifully formatted Rich Text blog post as a field into a proposal packet, which you could then send to someone else in a message thread to form a collaborative workflow. Furthermore, cards can trigger actions, such as invoice generation and whole payment processes!

Check out Chris Tse’s product talk or our blog post to learn all about the Cardstack Builder and the Cardstack Workflow.

Cardstack’s Founding Director Chris Tse introduces the Cardstack Builder and the Cardstack Workflow.

The Status of the Cardstack Builder

In order to turn the Cardstack Builder into a product to be used by members of the Cardstack Network, we are following three tracks of development:

1. Card Schema (V2) data architecture

A card schema allows for cards to move across hubs, workflows, and threads, by encapsulating both the definition of the card (the form fields) and the template. We create a unique experience by allowing a template to be skinned or modified without affecting the rest of the app, as we combine card schemas (our data architecture) with our template layout compilation system (our rendering architecture), which is based on the work our team has done in the JavaScript front-end framework space, with our focus being on Ember.

This schema system is well under way! Check out the tech talk or blog post about our Card Schema (V2) data architecture and feel free to follow our work in our main Github repository.

2. Boxel design system

A great part of the Cardstack Builder’s UI relies on the composable user interaction system we call the “Boxel” design system. This system will make it possible to extend an application without requiring anyone to create a custom UI. In contrast to Google’s Material Design — which is only great for applications that are built by developers and used by users — we will allow users to not just experience, but build an application. While this is already possible in Excel and on the desktop, the Web is not as composable and currently requires this work to be done by talented development teams. At Cardstack, we aim to bridge that gap.

We are currently working on the Boxel design system and will soon invite the community to start playing around with the Cardstack Builder. If you are interested in testing our card building tool, keep an eye on our Telegram and Discord announcement channels.

3. Catalog of pre-built cards for common use cases

When it comes to builders, you currently have the choice between two not entirely satisfying options: You can use something like Excel — which gives you nothing more than number and text fields, but which does allow you to build entire financial dashboards on those seemingly mundane primitives. Alternatively, you can use Web apps — which give you fancier features like video players and images, but which limit you because those components don’t work well together. Features on the Web are not as composable as they are in Excel, where your dashboard becomes increasingly powerful as you add to it. The Card Catalog gives you the best of both worlds.

Once the Boxel design system is completed, we will be able to use our own card building tools to build a catalog of cards that provides all kinds of common cards needed for data collection, content management, asset encapsulation, workflow orchestration, and much more. Users can reuse these cards as templates for their own cards/apps, which they can then add as new cards to the Card Catalog.

Initially, all these cards will be in our GitHub repository, to be approved by our team before they are added to the official catalog. But eventually, the logical control that governs submissions to the catalog will be transferred to a smart contract. That will be an excellent use of the tools and blockchain infrastructure we are building on Githereum, the codebase of which is already open-sourced.

We look forward to the community’s feedback and can’t wait to see what kinds of cards you can build with the tools we provide, while starting to share the cards you have created with a broader community. Our goal is to provide a real decentralized alternative to SaaS software — allowing people to pay one subscription fee and allocating that money proportionally to the community members, based on whose cards people use in the Cardstack Network.

The Cardstack Roadmap for 2020

Our strategy for the Cardstack Project in the coming year revolves around one Card Catalog that contains everything and that is created using the Cardstack Builder. Thus, while we keep following the development tracks we have been pursuing so far, we will converge our efforts towards one concept, one goal, one platform. As our new roadmap shows, the planned launches of Tally, Card.Space, and the Card Catalog are all aligned, with the aim of getting Cardstack ready to jumpstart the decentralized SaaS market.