Table of Contents:
- What Is Low-Code Development?
- Why Does Low-Code Matter?
- What type of business is low-code software development appropriate for?
- Benefits Of Low-Code Development
- Popular Low-Code Development Platforms
- Low-Code Platform Feature Considerations for Choosing a Framework
- Why Now is the Time to Team up With a Low-Code Development Company?
- What are the main steps to create a low-code application?
- Low-code software development – Crest Infosystems Imperative
- Common Low-Code Use Cases Using Microsoft Power Platform
- Does using a low-code platform reduce cost?
- What is the enterprise value of low-code app development?
It is estimated that more than half of all medium—and large-sized businesses adopt a low-code platform for developing their strategic applications. Companies want to be able to more easily adapt to changes in the market, legislation, or customer needs by developing simple, faster enterprise solutions that are easier to integrate, modify, and upgrade.
As reported by KPMG, companies have nearly quadrupled the number of automation investments they make into low-code and no-code platforms. Among the industries experiencing significant growth is BFSI, which is the world’s biggest market for low-code platforms. The trend and need for low-code development platforms will continue to grow in the upcoming years.
In this article, we will explain everything about low-code development and guide you through the process of rapidly developing enterprise apps using it. So, let’s get started with the basics of low-code development first.
What is Low-Code development?
Low-code can be defined as a visual approach to software development that optimizes the entire development process to speed up delivery. By automating every step of the application lifecycle, low-code can streamline the deployment of a variety of solutions.
By collaborating continuously with your organization’s business and IT departments, you can develop solutions that meet your company’s needs. Therefore, low-code offers advanced capabilities that make developers work faster and smoothly.
Why Does Low-Code Matter?
A low-code platform speeds development by allowing users to use its visual editors and reusable actions with simple drag-and-drop options. Rather than researching, writing, and testing new scripts, developers can quickly assemble new processes and build applications.
With low-code development, you can eliminate any complexity in building highly scalable, modern, and innovative apps for your business and scale up your applications quickly. It helps organizations quickly adapt and respond to fast-changing business conditions.
What type of business is low-code software development appropriate for?
Low-code development technologies allow users with less coding experience or from a non-technical background to create, edit, modify, or update applications quickly and more efficiently with simple drag-and-drop functions and visual tools.
Businesses that want to save time and money on IT resources with rapid delivery can take advantage of implementing new application processes quickly.
Many businesses and IT experts use low-code development tools to build enterprise applications, microservices, REST APIs, etc. Professional developers encapsulate their code into modules that the entire development team can drag and drop into their applications when custom code is needed.
Low-code development is very useful for small businesses, helping them get their jobs done quickly and professionally. Although the advantages of low-code are numerous, you must also consider its drawbacks, so it might not be the best solution for businesses that require complex applications with many features.
Benefits Of Low-Code Development
In low-code development, developers directly work on pre-built design templates and improved interfaces, which speeds up development and facilitates customer experiences across platforms.
It helps businesses provide outstanding customer experiences without disturbing the product’s functionality. Below are the top benefits of low-code development:
- Provides a rapid app development process to build an app based on your business needs.
- Low-code attributes, such as a development toolkit, reusable components, and visual user interfaces, enhance developers’ productivity.
- Streamline communication and collaboration across the team and enable faster decision-making.
- Build a perfect solution that is easy to maintain and scale on a cloud-native architecture.
- Create a wide range of applications for automating processes and updating mission-critical systems without incurring high costs.
- To provide consistent improvements for end-users with engaging web, mobile, conversational, or immersive experiences.
- Encourage developers to build more applications throughout the organization.
- Keep your business and customer needs flexible so you can respond quickly.
Popular Low-Code Development Platforms
Now that you have a good background in low-code development, you might consider investing in a low-code platform for yourself.
Below are top-rated low-code platforms with high ratings amongst various software development processes.
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1. Appian
Appian is the most popular low-code platform that offers various native deployment tools and integration options with DevOps tools like Jenkins. It is designed for businesses of all sizes, helping them to create Business Process Management (BPM) applications, which further help businesses better manage and optimize their business processes.
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2. Microsoft Power Apps
Microsoft Power Apps is the best low-code development platform for creating custom business apps quickly and very effectively without any complexity. In addition to its artificial intelligence components, the service has impressive functionality. Additionally, its extensibility is appealing, as the application includes more than 200 connectors for integrating disparate information and systems.
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3. OutSystems
OutSystems is an omnichannel low-code platform that allows enterprises to build applications across various mediums. Among the most valuable features of the platform are its real-time performance dashboards and strong security measures, as well as its rapid development capabilities.
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4. Mendix
The Mendix platform offers various tools that can be used to test, build, and deploy applications through low-code technology. More than 4000 companies currently use Mendix. It is based on Model-Driven Engineering (MDE), which is an approach that emphasizes abstraction in development.
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5. Quickbase
Quickbase is another popular low-code development platform used to create workflows. Teams can use it to eliminate bottlenecks or reform operations with the ability to target bottlenecks. Quickbase also provides no code. In addition to this, the platform offers prebuilt marketplaces and useful third-party integrations to help businesses better.
Low-Code Platform Feature Considerations for Choosing a Framework
Framework: Using a low-code platform, you can rapidly prototype, design, and deploy web and mobile apps.
Intelligent Automation: The platform should be capable of automating simple to complex business processes. It should also be able to analyze data trends using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to determine the impact of strategic and tactical changes.
Integration: Regardless of whether objects reside in the cloud, on-premises, or locally on a device, server, or workstation, the ability to integrate with anything and everything is critical to its success.
Business Rules Engine: Business Rules Engines are part of high-end low-code platforms, which means rules can be defined once and enforced across the entire system.
Connected Operations: An ideal platform that uses REST APIs, SOAP web services, and integration adapters ready to use for easy integration with external data sources and legacy systems. Integrating disjointed data sources and applications allows your business applications to provide an integrated view of content.
Unlimited Depth and Reach: Low-code platforms should never force developers to leave the underlying low-code environment for development, maintenance, or extension.
True Cross-Platform Support: Features such as the ability to deploy on a variety of platforms should be provided as well as a migration path that allows applications to be easily ported to another stack of technologies.
Why Now is the Time to Team up With a Low-Code Development Company?
With low-code development platforms, business owners can create customer-friendly apps and carry out complex tasks more quickly. Low-code reduces the burden on software developers and makes coding more accessible. Consumers and employees demand fast-paced apps from organizations, which makes it easier for developers.
The following are some reasons why it is time to team up with a low-code development company:
- Improved capabilities to modernize legacy apps and innovate existing systems with integrated API solutions.
- Smart apps can enable personalized experiences for employees and customers
- Getting optimal value sooner, reducing backlogs, and moving faster.
- Faster innovation and app development at a reduced cost.
- Foster communication and collaboration across the team, ensuring greater productivity.
- Complete freedom to focus on the core of business needs.Foster communication and collaboration across the team, ensuring greater productivity.
- Automate tasks, optimize business processes, and eliminate complexity.
What are the main steps to create a low-code application?
Let’s take a look at the following steps used for creating a low-code application.
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1. Know your business requirements
Identifying the business problem or issue that the application is intended to solve, along with the types of big data needed, is a key step for IT and business users. Additionally, business users, IT, and data scientists (if there is a separate department for data science) should identify the big data that will not need to be brought into the application so that extra data does not create unnecessary overhead and slow down processing.
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2. Remove unnecessary data using artificial intelligence
It is the job of data scientists to develop a data filter in the form of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithm to have the big data sent to the low-code application free of any unnecessary information. You can apply the algorithm filter to data from the Midwest, but not to data about Australia, when using large data sets for weather forecasts in the Midwest. This reduces the size of big data files.
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3. Develop any necessary APIs
There are APIs for most major software packages built into low-code tools, but not all systems have them. The IT department analyzes the low-code app’s access requirements and checks for any missing APIs. It may be necessary to create an API if one does not exist.
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4. Convert unstructured data into fixed records
Data is selected from unstructured big data necessary for the app, parsed into data field chunks, and formatted into fixed fields within fixed records in this step.
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5. Integrate or normalize big data using an ETL tool
To access the data records from the other systems, the fixed records in the big data must match up with the records in the other systems. ETL tools can automate these steps based on the business rules defined in their software.
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6. Test and refine
To ensure that the business expects the results of the low-code app, the final step is to execute it to see if it captures the correct data, processes it correctly, and returns it. Creating low-code applications that can be used to run big data is time-consuming. Still, it is well worth it if there is enough big data that can be converted and used to develop low-code applications that are continuously reusable while also providing high business value to the company.
Low-Code Software Development – Crest Infosystems
Crest Infosystem is a world-leading software development company with over decades of experience and industry expertise in full-stack development technology. We help businesses move in the right direction through digital transformation. As a prominent name in cloud computing, we offer high-end custom web and mobile app and software development solutions that meet clients’ unique needs and exceed customers’ expectations.
Our team follows a proven Agile methodology that speeds up the process, accelerates delivery, and improves the productivity of your business application. At Crest, we help businesses drive more growth with greater revenue quickly and efficiently.
Common Low-Code Use Cases Using Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft PowerApps can be used to identify and solve business problems faster, streamline processes quickly, increase employee productivity, improve customer satisfaction, and boost revenue through faster time-to-market.
PowerApps Use Case #1: Employee Onboarding App
Microsoft PowerApps provides an amazing feature that lets you integrate seamlessly with data stored in other Office applications such as Outlook, tasks, and calendars. By combining resources such as policy guides, contact information, and forms on one platform, an employee onboarding app can be developed so that employees experience a hassle-free onboarding process. This also simplifies the role of HR personnel in onboarding new hires.
Microsoft also provides a PowerApps Office Template known as Onboarding Tasks. It functions as a one-stop shop for new team members, introducing them, filling out their profiles and pictures, tracking relevant onboarding tasks, etc.
PowerApps Use Case #2: Expense Approval App
Expense approval is a bit challenging as it includes various submissions and processes. PowerApps allows developers to create a mobile app for seamless expense approval. When an employee submits a request along with valid proof, they can claim an expense. The manager can add comments and approve or cancel the request when needed.
Notifications are sent to the requester to let them know how the request is progressing. It is easiest to integrate the app with any existing HR system.
PowerApps Use Case #3: Lightweight, Cross-Platform Applications
You may be surprised to learn that we still encounter enterprise systems that can only be accessed by a specific browser or are only supported by certain operating systems. In some situations, enterprises can justify this move. Still, enterprises are generally interested in creating accessible applications from a wide range of platforms without maintaining separate versions.
PowerApps Use Case #4: Rapid Delivery Application
Providing solutions quickly was one of the biggest challenges facing IT in the past year. Due to their ability to be written in low code, Power Apps can reduce the time to market for applications. The process of writing, testing, and managing code is greatly reduced. This means that if they are developed, they can not only decrease the amount of time it takes to transfer the relevant subject matter information (and decrease the chance of misunderstandings) but can also increase the pace of delivery and the number of unique ideas.
PowerApps Use Case #5: Service Request App
An interactive application that allows users to submit requests for IT services can also be developed on the PowerApps platform. Moreover, apps can also be built for other purposes such as tracking maintenance requests, purchasing orders, human resource management, and more. Regardless of the platform, the apps can be accessed directly through SharePoint or using the PowerApps mobile apps, which are available for Windows, Android, and iOS.
Does using a low-code platform reduce cost?
Low-code platforms enable developers to create enterprise-grade applications without requiring extensive programming, lowering costs and operating expenses. Developers often extract the tools they need to meet their business requirements from the low-code platform.
Therefore, it reduces the time and cost of development and provides faster application delivery.
What is the enterprise value of low-code app development?
Low-code development solutions provide IT users with the means to build applications and workflows by providing building blocks. These blocks abstract the code behind actions and commands, making business apps and workflows easier to build without the need to code.
Low-code development simplifies the development of great, modern business apps and reduces complexity. Thanks to these low-code benefits, organizations can easily adapt to their fast-changing business conditions.
Conclusion
Therefore, low-code technology is a good option for enterprise app development, especially when it comes to low cost and maintenance, and faster time to market. When businesses opt for the right platform, they can easily develop production-ready apps within hours rather than days or months. Due to the trend and growing need, low-code platforms will remain in demand in the future.
With decades of industry expertise, Crest Infosystems offers best-in-class low-code development services to build high-performance and scalable applications for businesses of all sizes. If you plan to build an enterprise low-code application with a low-code development methodology and want some help, don’t hesitate to speak to us.
