3.2 Low-Code vs. No-Code Frameworks

Low-Code Platforms

Vendor Low-Code Platform offerings provide App developer professionals a common set of automation tools and features to perform visual modeling App development, platform and App admin, and App deployment using automated DevOps and SysOps tools and features. This enables creation of smarter applications that provide users with intelligent decision support, automate tasks, and improve operating performance. These features are powered by core engines or services within the low-code platform – capability that low-code developers can draw on to enrich the functionality of their application.

In the absence of these low-code engines, developers would be forced to code them from scratch (a complex development challenge), or, more likely, they would choose to hand-code logic like process flows or business rules into their apps. The result? Those hand-coded applications would be far less flexible and much more expensive to maintain. As a result, low-code development offers a significant advantage whenever there’s a need to build automation into an application. Automation features of low-code platforms can include:

• A process engine that coordinates and manages end-to-end business processes. The process engine coordinates activities and data movement between people and other systems. It assigns tasks and routes work to both people and software robots. It also provides operational analytics that enable business leadership to monitor and improve performance.
• Robotic process automation (RPA) capability to fully automate low-value, repetitive tasks – freeing up users for more productive work.
• Business rules capability to define, manage and execute rules within the application. These rules can be used (and reused) for everything from defining organizational business policies and security policies to dynamically governing how interfaces are rendered.
• A wide array of AI services to improve application usability, guide users to informed decisions, and much more.

One of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of enterprise application development is integrating new applications with existing legacy “brown-field” or new “green-field” business system Apps. To reduce the cost of these integrations and enable low-code applications to fit seamlessly into an enterprise architecture, low-code platform vendors are investing in:

• Drag-and-drop interfaces for declarative integration development.
• A robust set of integration connectors to common enterprise systems and support for the latest integration standards such as OpenAPI, which enable no-code integration to a wide variety of external systems.
• Capabilities that enable low-code developers to effortlessly build APIs into their applications, so those applications can be called by other enterprise systems.
• Specialized capabilities for designing and building applications that are a composite of data from enterprise systems, coupled with newly developed application logic and interface design. This enables application modernization without the extract and port data from existing systems — a difficult and often risky process.

No-Code Platforms

Vendor No-Code platform functionality means just that...zero coding is required. Business SMEs quickly transform ideas (or needs) into business apps...with no-code app-building functionality. Most vendor low-code platforms have no-code functionality and tools whereby business SMEs use model-driven-development visual, drag-and-drop development tools and point-and-click interface creation to import data, create and review App functionality, give feedback, validate assumptions, and identify improvements to evolve the applications. However, in most cases only departmental web applications with simple functionality features can be completed using a no-code graphically driven, model-based-development environment.