This is the 23rd day of my participation in the November Gwen Challenge. Check out the event details: The last Gwen Challenge 2021
preface
In today’s world, the competition among various businesses, Internet and enterprises is extremely fierce, and all small and medium-sized enterprises are facing the challenge of digital transformation. Why do they need digital transformation? Digital transformation can make enterprises more agile and lower the cost of innovation.
However, the path of digital transformation is complicated and requires qualified developers who can quickly and accurately develop applications and processes that meet complex business needs. Developing a system from zero to one is risky because it has long lead times, can be costly, and is highly dependent on the developer’s expertise.
Most organizations and businesses need skilled, professional developers, and according to the 80/20 rule, truly skilled senior developers are in short supply.
The use of inexperienced developers, in the case of digital transformation, tends to affect or discourage productivity.
The emergence of “low code” is a new alternative, which may be a new trend.
What is low code
Low code is a faster and more robust way to develop software.
It allows complete solutions to be intuitively designed and built using interactive graphical user interfaces with little or no coding knowledge.
Low-level code developers may need a degree of custom coding knowledge to customize components or the interactions within them.
Compared to traditional programming methods, the low-code approach takes advantage of drag-and-drop elements, preset connectors, configurable components, visual ides, and more.
Thus, a low-code development environment allows fewer technical users to develop applications based on their needs.
In addition, it enables faster application delivery with minimal manual coding and upfront investment in development environment setup, testing, deployment, and maintenance.
At the same time, low code can increase the level of abstraction, allowing them to delve into details only when necessary, thus increasing the productivity of skilled developers.
Low-code application development can be divided into two categories: Low-code application development platforms These platforms help businesses quickly turn their ideas into mobile or web applications.
They are driven by the principles of visual programming, automated code generation, and AI-driven automation throughout the application development lifecycle, giving rise to the concept of “development for all.”
Low code Application integration platforms These platforms are helping developers connect applications together through visual development methods;
They allow cloud-to-cloud or cloud-to-on-premise application integration and easy data exchange;
In addition, these systems provide a set of platform capabilities such as observability, analysis, logging, security, identity management, high availability, and disaster recovery.
When to use low code
Low-code platforms can deliver applications faster than traditional development methods that require manual coding, but how do we determine if using low-code development methods will give us the competitive advantage we are looking for?
Some basic flags for when we can use low code are shown below:
Due to the changing nature of today’s digital business, the need for fast delivery is a key hallmark of this; Faster turnaround times are critical to winning business opportunities, and a low-code platform helps with this.
The lack of skilled software developers is another good reason to look for low-code platforms. Most companies don’t have experienced developers in-house to solve complex business integration problems. But with a low-code approach, even casual developers can easily turn their ideas into effective software.
Lack of time to focus on innovation due to major maintenance work is another reason to start using a low-code platform. Maintenance efforts can be significantly reduced by using low-code platforms, as they offer easy integration with many systems, one-click deployment, and ai-enabled visibility and analysis.
If a company is experiencing “shadow IT,” where different employees are using the company’s data on a variety of applications and infrastructures without proper validation processes from central IT, a low-code platform can be used to address the problem. Imagine a low-code platform that is approved and managed by the company’s central IT department. In this case, it can be used effectively at all levels of the company without violating company rules.
Benefits of low code
Rapid development is the main advantage of low-code application development, but there are many other benefits.
Improved Productivity – Developing applications faster means improved productivity across the business and leads to faster innovation time. This provides a very high competitive advantage for digital businesses.
Visual Modeling – Low code development enables a visual representation of the entire application process, enabling the average developer to quickly and easily understand the design.
Better integration – Integrating legacy applications and other systems is one of the key challenges of the digital transformation process. It requires a deep understanding of external systems, developing applications from scratch and connecting to them. But with less code (a few clicks and some customization), these integrations can be done easily.
Limitations of low code
While the low-code based approach has many advantages, it also requires some limitations and trade-offs.
One of the major disadvantages of most low-code platforms is limited functionality support; Most low-code platforms offer code-based customization when we need something more than regular visualization; But these customizations are sometimes more complex and difficult to understand than applications written from scratch.
In most cases, the ability to connect to external systems and services is critical. However, a low-code platform with a limited set of connectors or connection points can hinder future business requirements.
Debugging is one of the most important aspects of normal programming because it allows developers to stop software execution at any point and dig deeper to find the root cause of the problem. But for the most part, low-code platforms hide all of this complexity from developers. When something is not working as expected, it is much harder to identify problems in low-code platforms unless they have complex observable functions.
Performance issues can also be an issue for some low-code platforms. Due to the generic nature of the generated code, there are times when the load is high and the system may crash or fail to support operation.
Security and reliability are other key issues associated with low-code platforms. If the system is written from scratch, we know it like the back of our hand. But we don’t have full control, and it’s hard to identify all the bugs it might have.
In addition, choosing a low-code platform for an enterprise can lead to vendor lock-in and create some limitations in the future. Some platforms generate code that is impossible to maintain outside the platform.
Therefore, before choosing a low-code platform, it is important to check the customization capabilities, the ability to integrate with external systems, and its performance under extreme conditions.
Is low code the future
In Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-code Application Platforms 2020, Gartner predicts that “low-code Application development will account for more than 65% of Application development activity by 2024.” Prior to the COVID-19 crisis, the total market for low code development platforms was projected to grow by more than 40% annually to reach $21.2 billion by 2022.
While low code is nothing new, its value has been reignited by the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Low code proves its value by helping companies quickly build solutions that are critical to their digital transformation efforts.
Low code is not enough
While low code brings many key advantages, manual coding is not the most difficult part of developing an application. Managing the complexity of the entire development process is the hardest thing to achieve.
Therefore, what we really need is a platform that goes beyond low-code features that provide everything you need to develop complex business applications.
Such modern application development platforms provide visual development of applications, extension of applications through custom code, and processing or automation of the entire application life cycle within the same platform.
Some key features of such systems include:
Ai-assisted development: This can include guiding developers through recommendations for next steps, increasing productivity through intelligent auto-completion and automated data mapping, preventing non-functional defects by providing predictive performance and safety insights, and more.
Testing mechanisms that avoid technical errors and conformance issues: Real-time error detection, automatic test generation using AI-enabled sample data sets, built-in testing capabilities, etc., help developers easily verify the correctness of their applications and provide high-quality output without having to look for other testing mechanisms.
One-click Cloud Deployment: The ability to deploy applications directly from the development platform itself to a production-level cloud environment enables developers of any level of expertise to deliver their applications to target users.
Collaborative development: This brings creative potential for organizing teams to deliver applications quickly to users without having to travel back and forth.
conclusion
Hopefully, this article has provided enough information to understand what low code is and when to use it based on features and advantages and disadvantages.
It is not intended to replace traditional software development methods or skilled software developers.
It exists to fill gaps in traditional approaches and provide quick solutions to meet the growing needs of the digital transformation process.
As modern application development platforms advance, the low code space continues to improve, adding many other features that bring the best value to users.
References:
www.forbes.com/sites/ilker…