Abstract: IT is not so much that the era has chosen low code as that low code is creating the next brand new IT era.
This article is from the huawei cloud community “Low Code: The Choice of The Times”, by the agile xiao Zhi.
From the beginning of the birth of computer IT technology, IT has always maintained the momentum of rapid development. While we enjoy increasingly complete computer technology, we also face unprecedented complex challenges.
As hardware’s Moore’s Law is about to fail at the micro level and software complexity continues to rise, how do we adjust for the next IT age?
Low code and the development of hardware computing power
Throughout the development history of software development technology, it is not difficult to find that the evolution of software development technology is often derived from the improvement of hardware computing power. Hardware computing power is like the solid foundation of a building, supporting the rapidly increasing scale and complexity of software, which in turn drives the evolution of software development technology.
In the current era, transistor technology has reached the quantum realm, and the Moore’s law of hardware is about to fail at the micro level. But from a broader IT perspective, cloud computing continues to drive down the cost of computing power in another distributed way. So from a macro point of view, Moore’s Law continues to hold.
The scale of enterprise digitization will force enterprises to move away from linearly increasing cost of on-premise hardware deployment to cloud computing, where costs will continue to decline. Therefore, enterprises on the cloud, will become just need.
Enterprise after cloud, still faced with huge machine group (virtual machine though IT is), and digital scale growth is not only reflected in the concurrency value growth, more complexity and business growth, most of the companies IT strength is not enough to build a distributed architecture of application systems, calculate force advantages of cloud computing will be hard to get into full play.
As a result, software development techniques that support cloud computing must also be innovated. And the software development technology supporting cloud computing should be “cloud native” development technology. Of the “cloud native” development technologies that can help a large number of traditional enterprises make the transition to cloud computing in a low barrier and low cost way is low-code technology.
Low code and the development of software development techniques
From machine language to assembly language, to object-oriented, functional and other high-level languages, software development technology is actually climbing a “reuse” tree. Advanced development techniques are based on a large number of reusable patterns that are precipitated and solidified based on low-level development techniques. There is no silver bullet in software development as proposed in the Myth of the Man-month, because the complexity of software is increasing all the time. The only way to overcome the technical complexity is to abstract higher-order reusable components, allowing developers to assemble them from higher-order components on a higher platform. The manifestation of reuse is mainly reflected in two ways: componentization and framing.
Rich components in AppCube
In the age of machine language and assembly language, parts were machine instructions; In the era of high-level languages, parts are function calls and module reuse. So, the next generation of development technology, parts should be “pattern” reuse. The reuse of “pattern” is also embodied in componentization and framing. For example, rich interface interactive components belong to componentization multiplexing, while the acquisition and updating of background data by interface solidifies into a pattern belonging to framing multiplexing. Visualization is the most efficient and intuitive way to reuse patterns. Low-code technology, on the other hand, is synonymous with visual development.
Therefore, low code technology is the inevitable result of the evolution of software development technology. Low code will become the dominant development approach for the next generation of enterprise IT systems.
Trends in enterprise IT systems
Since the computer, the enterprise has IT this development direction. From the perspective of the whole enterprise’S IT development process, IT can be divided into the following stages:
Electronic: The medium of information has changed from paper to electronic information. At this stage, enterprises mainly introduce various tool software such as Office and AutoCAD to improve the efficiency of personal work.
** Informatization: ** enterprises begin to establish various information systems to provide support for information sharing and process collaboration in a certain business scenario. Such as CRM system, ERP system and so on.
** Digitalization: ** enterprises meet the problem of information island and need to cooperate with IT system through top-level design to servize the data and capabilities of IT system and realize efficient collaboration and sharing across scenarios.
** Intelligent: ** enterprises have accumulated a large amount of business data and numerous IT service capabilities, so they need to make more reasonable and optimized use of data and capabilities to command and dispatch various resources of the enterprise.
In fact, the development of an enterprise from small to large is basically in line with several stages in the IT field. So, at present, many enterprises have basically realized informatization and are on the way to digital transformation. The basic contradiction of enterprise digital transformation is the contradiction between fragmented supply and global sharing.
This basic contradiction is now in the field of IT, mainly IT system information island problem. IT requires a strong IT team and IT skills to break down information silos, build collaborative IT services, and use services to achieve rapid innovation. But for companies in most traditional industries, this is what is most lacking. Therefore, software development technology must evolve into a way to build and use IT services at low cost and low barriers to support the digital transformation of enterprises. This is the mission and value of low code technology. Therefore, low code technology is also the main support means of enterprise digital transformation.
AppCube multi-scene facilitates enterprise digital transformation
It is also worth noting that zero code (no code) techniques are not applicable to the same scenarios as low code techniques. Zero code is more targeted at enterprise informatization. Because there will always be incomplete coverage of enterprise informatization, zero code is more suitable for filling the blank fragments left by enterprise informatization construction.
From the three major background of The Times, IT can be inferred that: ** low code technology will become the mainstream development means of the next generation of enterprise IT system development, should be able to bear the responsibility of an era. ** We believe that low code technology should not only be used to build relatively simple and non-critical systems, but should be responsible for building most enterprise-level support systems.
Low code originates from the continuous progress of hardware computing power and software development technology, and feeds back to the complex IT era. IT is not so much that the era chose low code, but that low code is creating the next brand new IT era.
Click to follow, the first time to learn about Huawei cloud fresh technology ~