This is the first in a series of articles about building an app with linkalist. The hardest part about building an app is figuring out where to start. This is where linkalist can really help you out. We’ve done all of the hard work so that you can just start out building.

As our ethos is about building an app around your data, the first step is to define your first list. As far as linkalist is concerned, a list is collection of objects that share the same properties. So this list might be a message, a product, a person, etc. Once you have defined a list, you or your customers can Create, Read, Update and Delete items in this list.

In this series of articles, we’re going to use the example of an agile project management tool to describe how you can go about building an app.

We’re going to assume that you’re starting out with an empty linkalist application so you’ll probably see a message like that below when you log in.

So, our first step is to create a list. After following the instructions, you should have ended up on the “New List” page where you’ll be invited to create a list. As we’re creating a project management app, our first list will be used to contain the work items that go into the project. Hence, we’ll call our list “Work Item”. It is important for convention to use the singular form of the name as your list name as we pluralise it where required later.

In our example, we’ve filled out the data above and after you press save, you’ve got a very simple functioning web application that allows you to manage work items as you see fit. You can create, edit, list and delete these items as shown below.

And that is really all there is to creating a simple single list application. This is quite basic, but you’ve only spent 5 minutes building it, it does something useful and it’s a start. In our next article we’ll outline how to go about making this app a little more useful by bringing a second list into the picture.