Low-code platforms are a collection of tools that enable the visual development of applications through modeling and a graphical interface. Low-code enables developers to skip hand-coding, speeding up the process of getting an application to production.
According to Gartner, low-code will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024 and the pressure to deliver digital solutions to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this adoption.
To comprehend the increasing popularity of this development approach, it’s important to understand the concept of low-code, the composition of low-code platforms, and what problems low-code solves.
A low-code platform is a family of tools that enables the development and delivery of complete applications visually. A drag-and-drop interface is at the core of low-code platforms.
Rather than writing thousands of lines of complex code and syntax, you can use low-code to build complete applications with modern user interfaces, integrations, data, and logic quickly and visually. Applications are delivered faster and with minimal hand-coding. You can learn more about the benefits of low-code in this article.
An environment for visually defining the UIs, workflows, and data models of your application and, where necessary, adding hand-written code
Automatically handles data structures, storage, and retrieval
Automated tools for building, debugging, deploying, and maintaining the application in test, staging, and production. Beyond those basics, no two low-code tools are exactly alike.
Some are quite limited and more akin to a visual database front-end, like FoxPro in the 90s. Some focus on niche business needs, like case management. Others have adopted the low-code term to describe a purpose-built tool that has little to do with actual application development. No-code tools are also in the mix, although they cater more to business users and citizen developers.
Leading companies are delivering innovative software solutions across industries - from fintech solutions, to agile workplace innovation and massive legacy migration projects, low-code can address a wide range of use cases.
The pressure on IT organizations to deliver innovative solutions keeps magnifying. However, only a small group of top-tier companies have the financial and human resources to meet the market demand for speed with traditional development.
Most companies are buried under enormous backlogs, struggling to hire sufficiently qualified staff, and they are continuously asked to do more with less. In addition, if there’s one thing the pandemic taught us it’s that the agility to adapt to new and unpredictable demands is crucial for business survival.
Because low-code dramatically reduces the complexity of software development, companies of any size that adopt this approach have the power to increase developer productivity and speed. It elevates the value of developers, enabling agile teams to draw on their understanding of how to create and maintain high-quality web and mobile applications while flexing their wings by trying new technology.
With low-code, a UI/UX designer can do front-end development and a back-end developer can try prototyping a consumer app.
Put more simply, 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 on repetitive work. Sure, it’s fun to learn the latest faddish JavaScript framework or play with a cutting-edge NoSQL data store, but while you’re spending time debugging unfamiliar code, your competitor has an MVP in front of customers.
Unless you’re writing everything from scratch in machine code—and, no, assembly language doesn’t count—then you’re already taking shortcuts built on the work of others. Building software with low-code is the same as building software any other way.
Let’s compare creating an application using a common web framework to creating it using low-code.
Whether you’re working with .NET MVC, Spring Boot, or Ruby on Rails, you (and your team) go through roughly the same steps:
With low-code, it would look more like this
Most of the time spent hand-writing code in web and mobile apps is pretty much wheel spinning. Why should we tread the same path each time we start a new project if we don’t have to? Low-code lets us create applications visually using battle-tested fundamentals. Our focus becomes delivering something valuable to the world.
