Author/APICloud founder Liu Xin
———————————
Today we are going to talk about low code in a language that the public can understand.
In the past two years, “low code” has been an absolute hot topic both in capital level and in the attention of enterprise IT department. The Internet also seems to have sprung up all sorts of low-code companies overnight. What exactly is low code? Is low code new? What value does low code development bring to the enterprise? How can enterprises use low code? Which platforms are really low in code and which are fishing in troubled waters? Let’s say it all at once today.
What exactly is low code? Why does the enterprise need low code?
“Low code” literally means “writing less code than normal application development.” Let’s take a look at the value of a “low code” development platform:
1. Can develop “CloudNative CloudNative application” “on the cloud”;
2. Drag and drop development on the cloud in a visual or even WYSIWYG way;
3. It mainly develops “personalized application” based on mobile terminal, which needs to cover back-end and PC management capabilities.
4. Development requirements are usually peripheral applications initiated by business departments that need to be launched quickly and the overall application life cycle does not exceed one year.
In summary, the mainstream definition of low code is: to meet the needs of small and medium-sized mobile applications initiated by enterprise business departments, cloud native applications can be developed quickly on the cloud with visual drag-and-drop and a small amount of code. Such cloud platforms are often called low code development platforms.
How can enterprises use low code?
Tip 1: “If you want to develop an OA or ERP, you should not use low code **” **
As early as 2016, Gartner released a report on three classification modes of enterprise software, among which the “Speed Stratified Application Report” divides enterprise applications into three types: infrastructure-type (such as ERP), differentiated type (such as CRM) and innovative type (such as various mobile terminal applications).
The first two are the domain of enterprise traditional IT, the inherent IT pattern maintained and dominated by traditional IT personnel. As the degree of enterprise Internet more and more deep, the third kind of innovative applications demand rapid growth, namely to non-traditional IT dominated by application of the business department, these applications have “attributes” Internet “in the cloud” “short launch cycle” “experimental” short “life cycle” “uncertainty” “traditional IT department is not willing to pick up a hot potato” wait for a characteristic, The core of the emergence of low code platforms is to meet these development needs, rather than to take over the OA, CRM, or even ERP market.
The dimension
Infrastructure type
Differentiation type
innovative
Application characteristics
Reliable, does not require frequent changes, updated every 6-12 months
Configurable, updated every 3-6 months
Rapid development, trial-and-error properties, personalization, weekly and even daily changes
The life cycle
10 years +
1-3 years
0-12 months
Implementation of the cycle
7 years up and down
1 to 2 years
Six months at most
On behalf of the type
ERP
OA * *, * * CRM
** applets, APP, **H5
By identifying the types of enterprise applications, you can determine which applications in the enterprise can be developed with low code.
Second, the enterprise needs low code developers, of course, do not expect the business department to develop low code, but also do not rely on pure inherentITdepartment
When low code started to take off in foreign countries, there was a bright vision that Citizen Developer, a business person with no technical background, could use a low code platform to develop innovative enterprise applications. But the reality is that even with the ability to understand computer code in English, there will be no applications that business people can develop. After all, low code is not code free, and there are still quite a few coding and technical requirements.
Having IT use a low-code development platform to help the business develop innovative applications sounds logical, but IT is paradoxical, because IT already has tools and systems that make programmers more productive, and there is no need to use a new one. Moreover, “serious” programmers don’t want to improve their development skills by using a set of tools that “look like they’re working for them but are actually ruining their career.”
The needs of business units are real, and the inherent IT teams are not willing to embrace these innovative applications around them. Because of this low code development platform arises at the historic moment, and low code platform tend to be “your budget to find new business department personnel (internal or external) to meet the demand of the development of these innovative application”, so low code development platform, to have a lot of mature and developers, to create their own “low code development ecology” is the core task.
In this free-for-all of low code jianghu, how to distinguish* *”Li kui“and“phoney“* * * *? 支那
In fact, it is interesting to study the low code leadership companies abroad, it will be found that all the leadership companies are very “old” companies, almost no new companies. These companies used to have their own core competencies. For example, Outsystems and Mendix focused on BPM (workflow) before, and Kony focused on MADP (mobile development platform) before. The core of low-code development of Microsoft and SAP is the reorganization of aPaaS and MADP before.
It can be seen that the low code development platform abroad is not a new innovative technology, but a new model based on the existing technology. That is, LowCode is the mainstream LowCode platform formed by combining the process-based BPM, the componentized cloud native based on visualization and aPaaS with MADP’s rapid development of cross-platform mobile Internet innovative applications. Whether a low code company has at least one of the three important genes of BMP, MADP and aPaaS is an important criterion for judging whether the platform is a low code company.
“Low code” is literally “writing less code than normal application development”. But not all code-saving approaches to development can be called “low code.” True low code has certain qualities.
The key elements of a low code development platform can be summed up as “3+1” by looking at the definition of a low code development platform by Forrester and Gartner’s leading platforms such as Outsystems, Mendix, Appian, and Kony:
Three capabilities: Visualization (drag and drop), MADP (mobile first), aPaaS (Development environment on cloud) .
One must: have a supporting ecosystem (mature developers, ability to connect to other cloud or enterprise internal systems).
Of course, many people also talk about concepts like “model driven”, “forms driven”, “mid-stage capability”, “continuous integration” and so on, which are possible factors to cover rather than unnecessary ones. Different low-code development platforms have different priorities that I won’t go into here. In short, remember that 3+1 makes it easy to tell the difference between “real” and “fake” low-code development platforms.