I’m Frank, part of the engineering team re-imagining how software is built at Superblocks. We’re an extensible low-code platform that developers use to build mission-critical internal apps and workflows.

We just launched “Control Blocks”, a visual builder for backend business logic that enables developers to drag and drop “blocks” (conditional, loop, parallel, try/catch, variables etc.) onto a canvas and construct cohesive business logic that reads linearly like code.

The industry's approach to visual builders thus far has primarily been free-form flow diagrams where lines define the “control”. This approach works fine for a small set of blocks. However, as logical complexity increases, it quickly becomes impossible to read and debug. We wanted to take a much different approach that catered to the enterprise developer by retaining the same abstractions as code.

With Control Blocks, developers get a visual programming language that looks, feels, and scales like code. We provide the core primitives that allow you to build visually in Superblocks what you would through code. Some of these primitives, such as our take on parallelism, offer a much simpler abstraction than code. With this approach, operations like debugging and refactoring feel much more “native”. With this as our foundation, we’ve found that it is much easier to design features for testing, tracing, reusability, breakpoints, generative AI, and more.

On the technical side, we used this as an opportunity to improve our core execution engine so that it can provide the performance and reliability needed for enterprise usage. We migrated from TypeScript to Golang and started utilizing V8 for our binding resolution engine.

Read the linked blog and watch the embedded video and let’s have a conversation about your thoughts on our new take on this visual builder.