Outsystems is good. I have programmed in it for 2 years, and we also built a product having some very dense UI. But in my experience it is still not perfect. It lacks some mainstream features and has limitations. It does not model web apps as SPAs but for mobile app it does. Granted we can mix JS but that only complicates things.
How do I do multithreading in Outsytems? I know there is BPT - but BPT and timers have their own limitations.
I could go on.. also Outsystems these days only keeps C# as backend stack. I should have the choice of Java as backend with multiple other runtimes.
Yes its not vendor lock in, but this is technology lockin.
I had great hopes from Outsystems and to an extent it hits the sweet spot. But cant recommend it for modern, complex distributed web apps .
On the SPA front, I believe there will some movement on that front this year. Look out for "Modern Web Apps" as a new application category.
For multithreading, I take your point and agree. A heavily multithreaded component is not the best use case for OutSystems and if you want to use one, it is probably best written as an extension in C#.
As for dropping Java support, here's the rationale: Trying to support .Net and Java was costing engineering resources and also leading to inconsistent user experiences. Additionally, there are lots of other languages/platforms out there beyond C# and Java so the approach going forward to integrate with heterogeneous languages/platforms is to integrated into them using containers which is supported from version 11.
As for lock in, that's true of any proprietary product. However, it's worth noting that if you terminate your subscription you get all the source code and can run it up independently of OutSystems. Of course, you might argue that it's not as easy to change, which is true - but if you want to do lots of changes quickly, why not just stay with OutSystems? :)
So finally for complex web apps, I would argue you can do it (and you can check lots of references of places that have) but the tech is old and this will be improved starting this year. You can also build hybrid (i.e. Cordova based) mobile apps easily too - almost a third of new apps built on the platform are the latter.
