What's the low code?

Low code is a software development approach that delivers applications faster and minimizes manual coding. A low code platform is a collection of tools for visual application development through modeling and graphical interfaces. Low code allows developers to skip manual coding, speeding up getting an application into production.

According to Gartner, low code will be responsible for over 65% of application development activity by 2024. The pressure to provide digital solutions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic will only accelerate the adoption of this application. It is important to understand the concept of low code, what constitutes a low code platform, and the problems solve.

What is a low code platform？

The low code platform is a set of tools that visually develop and deliver complete applications. Drag-and-drop interfaces are at the heart of low-code media. Instead of writing thousands of complex code and syntax lines, you can quickly and intuitively build complete applications with modern user interfaces, integration, data, and logic using low code. Applications are delivered faster with minimal manual coding. In this article, you can learn more about the benefits of low code.

There are three typical low code development platforms:

• Visual IDE: An environment for visually defining your application's UI, workflow, and data model and adding handwritten code if necessary.
• Connectors to various back ends or services: Automate data structure, storage, and retrieval.
• Software Life-cycle Management tools: Automated tools for building, debugging, deploying, and maintaining applications in test, staging, and production.

Beyond these basics, no two low-code tools are the same. Some are very limited and more similar to visual database front-end, such as FoxPro in the 1990s. Some focus on niche business needs, such as Case Management. Others use low-code terms to describe specialized build tools unrelated to application development. Code-free tools are also included, although they cater more to business users and citizen developers.

The pressure on IT organizations to deliver innovative solutions is increasing. However, only a few first-class enterprises in the traditional development mode have the financial and human resources to meet the market demand. Most companies are overwhelmed by vast backlogs of work, struggling to find enough qualified staff, and constantly being asked to do more with less. Moreover, if the pandemic has taught us anything, flexibility to adapt to new and unpredictable demands is essential to business competition.

Because low code dramatically reduces the complexity of software development, companies of any size adopting this approach can increase developer productivity and speed. It increases the value of developers, enabling agile teams to leverage their understanding of how to create and maintain high-quality Web and mobile applications while spreading their wings by trying out new technologies. With low code, UI/UX designers can do front-end development, and back-end developers can try to prototype consumer applications.

Low code is a way for developers to get more done. With low code, they can spend more time creating and building and less time doing repetitive work. Sure, it's fun to learn the latest popular JavaScript frameworks or work with cutting-edge NoSQL data stores. Still, when you spend time debugging unfamiliar code yourself, competitors have already pushed MVP into the customer market.

What is a low-code work environment?

Building software with low code is the same as building software any other way. Unless you write everything from scratch in machine code -- not counting assembly language -- you're already cutting corners on someone else's work.

Rather than writing another user management system by hand, handling the features of the latest programming framework, or writing 10 tests before a line of application code, you can create something new and valuable. Now that these issues have been resolved and patterns are well understood, why start from scratch?

Let's compare an application created using a simple Web framework with an application developed using low code.

1.  Traditional software development processes

Whether you use NET MVC, Spring Boot, or Ruby on Rails, you will go through roughly the same steps:

Determine requirements, plan architecture, select back-end frameworks, libraries, data stores, etc. Preferred front-end frameworks and deployment stacks, set up CI, create operations plans, wireframes, and prototypes, manually write Ul code in the JavaScript framework of your choice and write tests and model definitions. Then, connect them to the data - write business logic - create a view to provide or receive the JSON data from the front - apply them to your workflow and UI - use the interface or support library integrated third-party API - repeat until the test passes for security - performance, quality, and user acceptance testing - deployment, patches, monitoring, and adaption until the end of the application's process.

2.  Low code development process

Confirm requirements, select any third-party API, and draw the visual IDE's software workflow, data model, and user interface.

Connect API when necessary, add any manual code to the front-end or custom automatically generated SQL queries, test user acceptance, deploy production, and then push updates with a single click.

As you can see, low code takes 7 steps instead of 16, and most of the time, writing code by hand in Web and mobile applications are almost repetitive. Why do we have to repeat the same mistakes every time we start a new project if we don't have to? The low code allowed us to intuitively create applications using battle-tested basics, while our focus was on providing value to the world.

Limitations of low code

While low code makes it possible to create working applications quickly, many low-code platforms require trade-offs. Applications can buckle under the weight of functional and non-functional requirements when scaling, integrating with existing systems, or performing under extreme conditions such as black Friday mobile banking applications. If an application built with low code needs to be updated or the underlying technology needs to change, that can be a disaster.