What can you do with Power Pages?
Many companies are looking for ways to communicate better and more efficiently with customers and employees and share data securely. Power Pages fits in perfectly with that. In principle, you could even use it to build a B2C portal, although we don't see that application much in the market yet.
Power Pages is part of the Power Platform and, at first glance, it is also a low-code solution. Unfortunately, that is not entirely true. To get the full power out of Power Pages, you need some extra tools that are missing from Microsoft's standard toolkit. The platform isn't completely low-code either. For more complex functionalities, you need full-code skills.
On the other hand, creating content pages and presenting data from Dataverse can be done very quickly and with few skills. Actually, Power Pages are therefore an excellent example of “fusion development”, where low-code (and therefore possibly citizen development) and full-code come together.
The limitations of existing development tools
To build Power Pages, you can choose between two routes: Liquid and PCF components (PCF stands for PowerApps Component Framework). Liquid is a template language and therefore looks like HTML with some extra options. The big advantage: with a little bit of HTML experience, you can get started quickly. This makes Liquid ideal for simple tasks, such as showing a single table from Dataverse.
But if you want more, you quickly run into limitations: you have less flexibility and control, and the development experience is not efficient because you have to save your code and refresh the page to see changes every time.
PCF components have more or less the opposite advantages and disadvantages. They require more development experience and knowledge of, for example, React. In doing so, they do give much more freedom and control. It allows you to build complex functionalities that are not possible with Liquid. That does take more time, and you have to publish the components and put them on a page before you can test them, which slows down your development cycle.
When Liquid, when PCF?
In practice, we don't use Liquid often, but that's mainly because Blis Digital is simply a development agency: if it's possible with Liquid, the customer can usually do it themselves. That's why our Power Pages projects are usually about coding PCF components.
But Liquid certainly has its uses. Because Liquid is rendered on the server, it ensures faster loading times. So if performance is an important requirement, we choose Liquid.
But most of the time, we need the freedom and control of PCF components for our complex projects. In addition, we have talented React developers in our team, so we can also deliver results quickly with PCF.
In addition, we can combine Liquid and PCF components for a nice balance. We then retrieve data server-side with Liquid and further process it into a PCF component.
A powerful platform with poor tools
Power Pages is a powerful platform that, in our opinion, is underused. And that's because the available development tools are simply substandard. There is a need (among us, but probably among many more Power Platform developers) for integrated tools that allow you to develop, test and deploy Power Pages locally quickly and easily.
So that's what we started working on.
In the second part from our blog series about Power Pages development, you can read how the Development Toolkit works.
In part 3 of the series: how do you test Power Pages? And what other features are we adding to the Development Toolkit?
Want to see the Power Pages DevKit in action? Just contact us and we'll schedule a demo.
.jpg)
