Introducing Control Blocks: Build any backend business logic visually

Every successful internal application and automated workflow is built upon robust business logic. This logic is often complex, requiring a multitude of integrations and advanced data manipulation. Crucially, mission-critical business logic must execute quickly and reliably, at scale.

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While custom development offers maximum flexibility, extensive code comes with complexity, maintenance burden, and engineering cost. Low-code tools make programming more efficient, but the UX of these tools has historically deteriorated quickly as logical complexity increased, relying on convoluted flow diagrams that were difficult to understand and iterate on. 

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Today, we’re excited to introduce Control Blocks in Superblocks, providing the first enterprise-ready low-code builder for backend business logic across apps, workflows, and scheduled jobs. Developers can build any business logic visually by dragging and dropping Control Blocks for conditionals, loops, parallelization, error handling, and more. The result is the best of both worlds: a dead simple low-code interface that scales as complexity increases, and the precision, flexibility, and extensibility of custom code. 

Developers building backend business logic in Superblocks can:

• Integrate with any database or third-party API
• Eliminate boilerplate logic for pagination, parallelization, promise handling, and more
• Extend infinitely with Python and NodeJS
• Debug, test, and optimize using AI 

All of this logic is executed on the server-side and scales elastically with on-demand cloud compute to maximize performance.

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Integrate with any database or API

Superblocks makes it easy to securely connect to databases, SaaS apps, and internal APIs. Developers can use out-of-the-box integrations with databases like Postgres and MySQL, data warehouses like Snowflake and Redshift, cloud storage like S3 and GCS, and apps like Salesforce and Zendesk. For any API without a pre-built integration, including those internal to your organization, simply upload the OpenAPI spec or configure a custom GraphQL or REST integration. 

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Control Blocks supercharge integrations. With minimal code, developers can paginate through response data, parallelize queries and API requests, loop over lists to fetch information for each item, and much more.

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Eliminate boilerplate logic

Modern developers often reimplement common but nuanced functionality like pagination, parallel processing, async handling, and exponential backoff from scratch for each project.

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In Superblocks, developers use Control Blocks for visual programming instead of writing boilerplate logic in code, with loops, conditionals, parallelization, error handling via try/catch, and more. Since the visual builder is linear, like code, there is no learning curve or complex flow diagram to manipulate, making iteration quicker and debugging simpler. This approach means less custom code, reduced complexity, fewer bugs, and lower maintenance costs.

Extend infinitely with code

Developers can extend infinitely by writing Python or NodeJS within APIs and Workflows, importing from any library like Pandas or Plotly in Python and Lodash or Moment.js in JavaScript. All code is executed on the server-side with elastically scaling cloud compute for lightning fast execution and optimal throughput.  

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Combining the feature-rich, user-friendly visual builder with the extensibility of custom code ensures developers can build any business logic in Superblocks seamlessly at high velocity. Developers minimize boilerplate by relying on Control Blocks for the heavy logical control flow, then write a quick Python or JS snippet to post-process results into the desired format.

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Debug, test, and optimize with AI

In custom development, as logical complexity increases, debugging, testing and optimization can become unwieldy. In order to maintain visibility and debuggability, developers often integrate with services such as an observability provider, which is itself a drain on development resources. Most low-code platforms, on the other hand, lack visibility and error handling altogether.

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Control Blocks simplify the development of complex business logic. To ensure bugs and performance issues are easily detectable, each API execution displays a trace view in-line, providing visibility into each logical step. Developers can test specific steps in isolation, optimize lengthy operations, and catch and debug errors using a context-aware AI assistant. 

Build any backend business logic visually, without limits

Superblocks developers build any backend business logic visually, with a few key benefits: 

• Usability - Through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, developers build business logic that reads like code but is much simpler to understand, augment, refactor, and debug
• Flexibility & Extensibility - Developers can extend infinitely by integrating with any data source, using Control Blocks for logical control flow, and writing custom code in Python or NodeJS, avoiding traditional low-code constraints
• Performance - Enterprises can confidently build mission-critical apps, workflows, and jobs in Superblocks that run on the server-side, undergirded by cloud compute which scales elastically for maximal throughput and minimal latency

Start building with Control Blocks in Superblocks today

Learn more about building backend business logic in Superblocks by reading the documentation. 

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‍Sign up for Superblocks and ship powerful enterprise-ready internal tools without limits today.