What the hell is a Low Code Platform?
Where all this began…
Okay, so it's time for a story. Low Code development platforms have been here for a few decades now. Yeah. it traces back to the fourth generation of programming languages (4GL)… you don’t believe me…try searching on Google. 4GL languages were made to make life easier for people, like let's say developers and non-developers, who don’t know much about the language but enabled them to create applications, using the language, themselves. But the name “low code” was not popular until 2016,
But recently “Low Code Development Platforms” has been hot as cloud applications grew exponentially. Every software company started moving their product to the cloud and started selling subscriptions instead of selling a single product. This movement is great. Now you need only a computer with normal configurations to use these products as all the heavy processes are happening somewhere else. This is now even happening for the gaming industry. Try guessing who else moved to the cloud. Developer-centric technology companies.
Why Low Code?
With the emergence of the cloud, developer-centric technology companies trying to provide platforms to enable developers to manage SDLC(software development life cycle), ALM (Application life cycle management), Continues integration (CI), and Continues deployment (CD) very easily in a single place. Especially cloud services such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure are focusing on this now as they are ranked as top tear cloud providers. They have the infrastructures and what they need was to include a very easy way for developers to create applications and use their platforms to manage their life cycles. So They implemented low code platforms to make these steps easier so even people with less knowledge can easily use their services.
What Low Code platform promises to developers is to hide the complexities programming from scratch presents (such as higher learning curves, higher time to market, have to depend on few team structures, nightmares when comes to CICD, etc.) and provide a fast and robust way for an application to be released to the world with the developer being the only one involved in the whole process. Hence why low code.
WTH! If you are a developer why don’t you wanna write code?
Yeah, I know I know, right now you are thinking the same, isn’t it? well, I was in the same boat as you are. As a hardcore developer (It's my blog. So I can say that I am.. that’s the rule) my ego was not letting me use any low code platforms thinking the same thing “If you are a developer why don’t you wanna write code”.
Well, my friends then I was introduced to today's world. Which is driven mostly by APIs. Everything is now available as a service over the internet as most organizations are now making themselves digital. And most importantly time to market is now reduced to like a few months or even lesser for some cases. So let's say you are developing an application to listen to issue creation in GitHub for your repo, then based on the label update a database that uses to create a report end of a sprint and send an SMS to your Engineering manager. Let’s break down what you have to learn and what you have set up.
You have to learn
- GitHub Webhooks
- How to send SMS and the library configuration.
- How to create a scheduled job
- have to research the database that you gonna use and let's assume it's a new database and you have to learn it a bit.
You have to setup
- CI-CD for your application
- Database
- Scheduler
- Environment to run the app
- Monitoring
There can be other things but most probably these are the things that you will run into in this scenario. But when it comes to low code platforms all these are provided to you in a way with few clicks you can set up everything and UI will guide you through the configurations of GitHub webhooks and SMS services. Also, you don’t have to worry about setting up databases as it will also be done by the low code platform for you and it even will guide you through queries. Scheduling will be just selecting when you want to run the application. Another major advantage is that DevOps related to your application can be done by you with few clicks.
So this means we don’t have to code anymore?
Okay, Joke aside there is one thing we need to keep in mind when it comes to low code. Low code platforms are great when it comes to developing integration scenarios and managing SDLC, DevOps as there will be predefined connectors and UI support for one-click deployment and such. But remember you still have to come up with the architecture, business logic, how the environment resides, and what monitoring levels you need. Also in most advanced platforms user is given the code editing capability as in any case user can switch between low code and code editing as the user prefers. Because what low code does is help reduce unnecessary time spent on setting up stuff like connectors and learning how to use them with UI assistance and generate code for connectors with necessary inputs from the developer. After this, it doesn’t matter you want to use the visual editor or the code editor. It's what you prefer as you are mostly ahead with the implementation as most hard parts like configuring connectors are done. Once implementation is done you can use low code platform functionality to deploy your app easily and make it available without any time spent and monitor the application status.
Also, keep in mind that low code platforms are not capable of supporting development for bigger projects those you have to still develop separately, and if you want you can use the other capabilities like DevOps capabilities from the low code platforms. What I am trying to say is that Low Code Platforms is not here to replace the programmers but here to make their and their organization’s life easier.
Summary
- Low code platforms will help developing integrations and APIs with less time.
- Low code platforms will help to manage SDLC and DevOps such as CI-CD, Environments, and monitoring.
- Low Code will not replace programmers.
- On most platforms, users can switch between Low Code editor and code editor for a better development experience.
In the next post, I will try to provide basics knowledge and walk you through an example of creating your own low code editor.
