Low code has become a very popular term recently among development communities. To what extent it overlaps with High-Productivity Platform as a Service (hpaPaaS) and Rapid Application Development (RAD) or is it new and uncharted territory, we would like to give our view on this matter.
What Low Code Platform is and Who should care about it?
Some wrong assumptions
- It is for lazy people who do not want to “code” too much
- It is for “citizen” developers who just do not know how to “code”
- It is for high level management’s satisfaction
- It’s main goal is to put limits to developers to avoid writing too much eventually buggy code
- It is limited by nature, that’s why the “real” developers hate it
- It failed many times in the past, hence will fail again
- To use low code tooling you need a mouse only, not a keyboard
Our assumptions
- It is for smart people who do not want to waste time in writing boilerplate and trivial code
- It is for clever developers who know very well what’s underneath
- It is for high level management’s safety
- It’s main goal is to give developers high productivity so to be able to focus on the business value
- It should not be limited, so that the “real” developers can modify and extend it at any level
- It failed many times in the past, so let’s try different approach paved from the lessons learnt
- To use low code tooling you definetly need both a mouse and a keyboard
Aspects considered in Low Code
- domain entities modeling
- user interface
- modeling mobile services
- database schema modeling
- business process modeling
- business rules
- access and permissions management
- API creation and management
- event driven architecture
- model driven architecture
- data services
- developer marketplace
- composite applications applications gallery
- tenant isolation
- policy management
- openness to platform integrations
- application performance monitoring
- self-service interface for provisioning
- AI-assisted development
- workflows automation
- services repository and governance
- shielding users from operational responsibilities
- one-button application packaging and deployment
- extensibility and extensions management
What do we believe
- Low code technics bring most value to business software vendors
- The major strength of a business software is to be extendable, customizable and configurable
- To guarantee that, the software vendor has to own:
- an opinionated runtime stack, by driving the definition and development
- an opinionated development model, which fits best to the vendor’s scenarios and goals
- the development tools, tailored for the opinionated development model.
- To guarantee all that, the vendor has to rely on open standards and open source, to boost the collaboration and adoption.
What do we offer?
We offer:
- opinionated runtime stack, combining a set of mature frameworks
- opinionated development model, based on Enterprise JavaScript for coding, also MDA, BPM and Forms
- opinionated integrated tools, fully extendable and customizable, lightweight WebIDE
Our stack is:
- entirely open source as well as its dependencies
- fully extendable, customizable and configurable on the different layers – runtime, development tools as well as the applications produced with the RAD tools themselves
Nedelcho likes to drive on off-road trails.