Abstract: According to an IDC survey, it takes three years for a person to master a new technology. For the entire manufacturing industry, with so many new technologies, it may take even longer. How can we solve this problem?
This article is shared from Huawei Cloud community “play Rubik’s Cube? Try Huawei Cloud application Rubik’s Cube low code platform!” , author: Qiming.
Cutting edge technology, low code development why so popular?
The low-code Development Platform (LCDP) is a development Platform that can generate applications quickly without coding (0 code) or with a small amount of code. The visual approach to application development enables developers of all levels of experience to create Web and mobile applications using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic through a graphical user interface.
From its introduction, we can find that its popularity is an inevitable thing.
The trend of enterprise digitization is obvious. No matter what the industry, the current “hot news” of enterprises is digital transformation. According to a 2018 Gartner CEO survey below, 42% of ceos consider digitalization to be central to their business or advocate digital-first strategies, and more than half plan to increase THEIR IT investments in 2019.
The low code in the digital era of the popular behind, is the process of enterprise digital transformation facing some problems. Take the manufacturing industry as an example, manufacturing enterprises have a long history of development, “traditional” and “complex” is its characteristics, but the industrial Internet is imperative. Then, in the case that the IT environment and social environment of manufacturing enterprises are so complex, and the number of personnel and capacity of these traditional enterprises cannot match their demands, how should some of our new technologies, such as 5G, big data and Internet of Things, be integrated into these enterprises?
According to an IDC survey, it takes three years for a person to master a new technology. For the entire manufacturing industry, with so many new technologies, it may take even longer. How can we solve this problem?
Low code philosophy: Let ordinary people do extraordinary things
Perhaps the answer lies in Peter Drucker’s words: there are never enough good people in business,…… The point is to make ordinary people do extraordinary things!
Specifically, the only way to solve the contradiction between the emergence of new technologies and the rapid transformation of business and the need to improve business efficiency is to let ordinary people do extraordinary things.
And this is hidden in huawei cloud AppCube low code design and development ideas and ideas. Once upon a time, there was a giant animal that fell into a tar pit, and God could only watch as it struggled deeper and deeper into the tar pit and died there.
Software development, in fact, is the same story. Software development is a very complex business:
The actual current software development results are the red curve. The white curve is the amount of work people put in. And in the middle, that’s the difference. The complexity of current software and business requirements are becoming higher and higher, the changes are becoming faster and faster, as well as the emergence of new technologies, etc., too many uncertain factors will lead to the generation of Gap.
The whole point of low code development platforms is to make uncertainty a deterministic factor. Let developers do simple things, and leave the complexity to the platform, is the direction of huawei Cloud AppCube concerted efforts.
The change of AppCube development mode helps the application to achieve customized development quickly
With the advent of low code development, the software development model will undergo even greater changes. For example, when we were working on a project, we would customize and expand on the baseline, case by case, and the r&d staff suffered terribly.
In the future, the development model will change dramatically:
Divide the base line into two parts with the platform as the bottom support. As mentioned above, leave the complexity to the platform, build the interface to the new technology on the platform, and encapsulate it; Some templates and replicable experiences we call “assets.”
As more replicable experience is added and the platform becomes more and more capable of settling, the threshold for customizers is lowered and the workload is reduced.
In this mode, we have two people:
On one side are the current software developers, who focus on the accumulation of replicable experiences, including the abstraction of business-level services, that can be made into corresponding microservices and put into the platform. Focus on business, process, design, and more. Based on this kind of business design and process design, realize the core business or core process and algorithm in the enterprise.
On the other side are business people. With the development of business, the demand for software personnel will increase. In this case, we abstract out these simple problems, reduce the threshold of customization, so that people who do not know software development can do related customization work on the platform, so as to solve the problem of software productivity.
In a word, let people with strong software development ability focus on assets and platforms, and let business personnel do relevant customized development, so as to jointly improve enterprise efficiency and application development.
In the data era, Huawei Cloud AppCube helps enterprises develop minute-level applications
The advent of the data era brings many enterprise developers not only benefits, but also challenges, especially for enterprise application developers, such as long development time, low reusability, and non-standard industry standards.
According to the above problems in the process of the current enterprise in digital, or for enterprise application development difficult problem, and replication difficult problem, huawei in this regard have done quite a time deposit, and based on its own application development experience and technology accumulation, launched a rubik’s cube low code application development platform.
As its name implies, “Rubik’s cube” represents the development of applications that can be developed in different scenarios with different complexity and requirements, just like playing rubik’s cube. Its main feature is the ability to solve five different industry application development problems in less than 10 minutes. How? Let’s talk about it in detail!
This section describes several application templates
In terms of software application, there are many ways in the industry from the initial development, the development of 0 1 and the replication from 1 to N after 0 1 development. Huawei Cloud has deposited a lot of industry templates on AppCube code development platform. With these application templates, enterprise developers can quickly develop applications or directly based on the template that has been completed 0~1 application development, and quickly realize their own applications.
Let’s demonstrate the power of AppCube in action!
As mentioned earlier, we do have quite a few related application templates, and we can start with the application template. First of all, we will give you a brief introduction of these existing industry application templates here.
Light application template: Equipment maintenance management application development
Equipment maintenance management system is from the enterprise equipment maintenance application practice. For example, air conditioning in some parks is broken, or some other equipment is broken and facing maintenance. Typically, the customer with the problem calls customer service; Customer service personnel after receiving, create a maintenance work order; The repair work order will be sent to the engineer soon. The engineer will record the overall maintenance situation after the on-site maintenance and then make a closed loop and feed back to the final customer through the customer service personnel. The above is the application scenario of equipment maintenance, as shown below:
Industry application template: smart smoke sensor application development
Intelligent smoke sensor is based on the intelligent smoke sensor fire protection system of a park. Smart smoke sensor provides facilities management, alarm analysis, and alarm warning related to common fire safety applications. In key fire prevention areas, such as gas stations and chemical plants, smoke sensors, cameras and other devices are installed and connected to the Internet of Things device management platform to report data such as smoke concentration in real time.
Smart smoke sensor applications access device data reported by the device management platform of the Internet of Things, monitor device data changes, process and analyze device data changes, and report alarms when the data exceeds the threshold.
Specific scenarios of intelligent smoke sensor mainly include the following points:
1. Devices such as smoke sensors and cameras need to be managed on the Smart Smoke sensor application side, for example, adding devices, deleting devices, and setting device alarm triggers.
2. Report device data. For example, the smoke sensor will sense the smoke concentration of the surrounding environment in real time and report the smoke value to the Device management platform of the Internet of Things.
3. Smart Smoke sensor connects to the device data reported by the device management platform of the Internet of Things and processes and analyzes the data, such as obtaining smoke values, querying related device data, and determining whether alarms are generated.
4. Smart Smoke Sensor displays alarms on the front page, such as the specific location of device alarms, alarm information, video surveillance, and related emergency linkage operations.
Light application template: Questionnaire application development
A questionnaire is a set of questions related to products and social activities, or a form of questions prepared for investigation, also known as a questionnaire. With the help of this questionnaire, researchers can accurately and concretely measure the process of product use or social activities, and use sociological statistical methods to describe and analyze the quantity and obtain the required investigation data.
The questionnaire application template scenario surveys the developer’s use of feedback to AppCube. Developers can modify this template to quickly customize the survey content for their own products.
In addition to the above classic application templates, there are also light application templates for epidemic situations, such as health punch card application development template, and performance evaluation application development template for performance approval.
Light application development practical operation drill
After a simple introduction to the development application template, we have a certain understanding of huawei cloud AppCube low-code platform. Next, we carry out a practical exercise to see how simple and easy to use lightweight applications are developed based on the platform.
1. Log in to our huaweicloud homepage (www.huaweicloud.com/), log in or register, and perform real-name authentication
2, enter AppCube product service page (www.huaweicloud.com/product/app.) , click “Use Now”
3. Enter AppCube service page and click “Enter Development Environment”
4. Enter the development-oriented interface of the low-code development platform
5. Take the application of Rubik’s Cube to develop “Equipment Maintenance Management” as an example, click “Use Template”
6. Create light apps
7. After entering the development page, click “Preview” to see the preview effect
8. On this page, you can see some related functions, such as “add an air conditioner”. Click “Device Management” – “Device List” – “New Device” (on the right) to perform related operations
9. Fill in the relevant information and save it to complete the operation of adding devices:
10. At the same time, click “Device Monitoring” to obtain the device position
11, assuming that the equipment is faulty, as a customer service staff, can be in the “work order management” – “new construction work order”, new work order task
12. Fill in the relevant content fields and save the submission
13. Click “My Work order” to view the work order
14, click “all work order”, click “order” operation to send orders
15. As a maintenance engineer, you can click “Maintenance Treatment” to get the work order and view the details of the work order
16. Click “Process” to process work order
17, after the maintenance is completed, click “process” again, you can “close the order” action
This is a closed loop of work order maintenance that can be easily done on a low-code development platform.
At the same time, for some fixed some fields, can be customized and custom modification. Path is:
Equipment–Page–customName1223edit
After entering the page, you can modify it according to your business requirements. Click save to directly generate a new application.
The above process, 2-3 three minutes can be easily completed, to achieve the true sense of magic way application development.
Customize the lightweight application development process
In addition to the above page customization modifications, you can also modify the overall flow.
Click Equipment–Flow–customName to see the current application process
Or WorkOrder–Flow
Industrial application development practice
For industrial application development, the practice is much the same as light application development. Taking the original template “Intelligent Smoke Sense” as an example,
Click “Use template” to carry out relevant development based on the original template:
Also click the “preview” small eyes, you can view the preview page:
The preview shows that the application can monitor some devices in the campus. If a fire occurs, the IoT monitors the location of the device and reports the device name. After the report is complete, the system prompts the management personnel to handle the fire.
Among them, it can also realize SMS sending, emergency alarm, picture components and other functions. For technical white, its operation is also very “brainless”, it can be said that in 10 minutes, a technical white can also achieve at least 5 industry applications. So how is huawei cloud AppCube low code development platform so easy to use?
The story behind AppCube
Definition: AppCube is a cloud-based one-stop development and operation platform for coding, refactoring, compiling, testing, publishing and launching.
In general, there are three parts to developing an application (see figure above) : data objects, logical choreography, and page choreography. After the development of related functions, the system will generate some logical text code, which can be packaged to run on the base platform. On this basis, we can normally go online and run some of the corresponding applications we see on the base.
To put it simply, AppCube is essentially an environment for application development and a platform for application execution.
After in-depth study, we find that the underlying design architecture diagram of Huawei Cloud AppCube is as follows:
Let’s start with the red part in the middle. As you can see, huawei Cloud AppCube provides the “engine” here, which is the code package used to execute some of the text logic generated by the choreography described above. That is, the code package runs on top of the engine. And when we talk about code packages, we become “metadata.”
In general, Huawei cloud AppCube is designed as a low code development platform driven by metadata.
Next, the Integration docking tool. AppCube provides tools for interconnecting with third-party systems such as IoT, video cloud, and other third-party systems.
In addition, it is “operation and maintenance platform”. The operation and maintenance platform can ensure the robust operation of the third-party development platform, so that the corresponding programs can be stably executed.
As a developer, in fact, there is less to pay attention to. You only need to open a development account in Huawei cloud and subscribe to Huawei Cloud AppCube to start your own development journey.
Huawei Cloud AppCube main industry applications
So what are the core capabilities and features of Huawei Cloud AppCube development platform?
As can be seen from the figure above, Huawei Cloud AppCube has five key capabilities:
Zero code: support developers in the case of no code development, business personnel through the interface and process drag and drop arrangement, can complete application development, so as to solve the contradiction of business personnel do not understand the technology, technical personnel do not understand the business, quickly build enterprise applications;
Low code: In addition to zero code, Huawei Cloud AppCube also provides low code capability. It is mainly for software development engineers. Software development engineers based on the low code platform to provide the corresponding orchestration capabilities, and complex logic can achieve the development of related applications. Reduce the amount of code, do a lot of choreography, you can build some complex application scenarios;
Multi-screen and multi-terminal: For applications developed in the preceding two methods, huawei Cloud AppCube can publish applications on different terminals, such as PCS and mobile phones. At the same time, it also provides a kind of experience replicable ability, based on this ability, you can complete 0 to 1 development on the template that has been developed, and solve the application of related scenarios. Developers customize based on template applications or use them directly.
Asset center: For example, some assets, including components, interfaces, service processes, and AP related, can be reused. Huawei Cloud AppCube puts replicable experience in the asset center, allowing developers to get reusable things in the asset center.
Online development and one-click release: After the development in the development environment, it can be released to the test environment and operation environment with one click, realizing the one-stop release platform from development, testing, online and operation and maintenance, thus greatly improving the development efficiency.
Based on zero code development or low code development, developers develop applications of thousands of lines and industries (smart parks, smart offices, smart cities, etc.), enabling developers to carry out agile development.
The more powerful function of Huawei Cloud AppCube lies in that if some functions cannot be realized after zero-code development, they can be handed over to software development engineers for low-code development. Zero code and low code development completely blend.
Low code development, rapid choreography, cost reduction and efficiency
Next, let’s focus on the “low code” features of the five points above.
Interface layout: Based on the interface layout function, it can realize the assembly of the interface and the design of the graphical interface
Business logic orchestration: in the low code development platform, you can carry out logic orchestration and design, such as to the bank to transfer an account, there needs to be a transfer out and into two accounts, so at least to balance, then you can use logic orchestration to achieve.
Data model building: After the orchestration of business logic is implemented, relevant business data is generated. Data can be stored in a database. And the database design, in the development, can be targeted model design, construction and the final data storage.
BPM Process scenario Choreography: For some human intervention processes, such as the processing of various aspects of the approval flow, the orchestration and setup of the relevant business processes can be based on BPM capabilities.
Based on the above four key capabilities, Huawei Cloud AppCube can support enterprises to quickly realize application development and optimization, thus saving labor costs and improving enterprise operation efficiency.
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