It has become our tradition to provide you with a thorough insight into the tech buzzwords, thereby discovering their essence and showing how they can be helpful for your business. Previously, we investigated the DevOps approach and learned a lot about its great benefits. Today, we add one more great element to our list of IT innovations — low-code platforms. It sounds really catching, doesn’t it? So, we’ll try to find out what that’s all about, its key benefits, and how it works step by step.
Decode the meaning of low-code
In today’s rapidly changing world, people need apps for almost everything. But it’s the business users, not IT, who foster innovation with wonderful solutions and creative ideas. The only problem is that they don’t have relevant technical skills to develop the newest applications. In this case, low-code platforms merit serious consideration. They require little training and can be easily used by business users without the help of IT specialists.
According to Forrester's (an independent research company) definition:
"Low-Code Platforms enable rapid delivery of business applications with a minimum of hand-coding and minimal upfront investment in setup, training, and deployment."
Traditionally, web developers write codes manually. In contrast, low-code platforms have little in the way of hand coding and building applications is completed through visual tools. Indeed, automation during the development clears the way for anyone, even people with limited programming experience, to build web and mobile apps easily and significantly faster.
Research results
It must be admitted that low-code platforms are modern, powerful and business-friendly. With the help of them the majority of processes, such as deployment, updates and integration, are done for you automatically. That is why this approach is presently considered the mainstream in business.
In 2016 Forrester conducted investigations concerning low-code platforms and their impact on the future of both business and IT. The report includes briefings with 42 vendors, a vendor survey and 33 customer conversations (interviews, client inquiries, and more). According to Forrester Research, the low-code market was at $1.728 billion in 2015. It is expected that it will grow up to $15.478 by 2020. It is therefore not surprising that many organizations are acquiring this kind of approach.
Benefits of Low-Code Platforms
Let’s take a closer look at the most significant advantages of providing low-code platforms for creating apps.
Stakeholder Engagement
Platforms help to quickly create and update applications, so developers have the opportunity to share fully functional features with stakeholders in hours or days. This increases the understanding and responsiveness of the whole team. It is the first and one of the most essential benefits.
No Need for IT Skills
Visual tools in platforms are really powerful. You don’t have to acquire IT skills and abilities, nor do you need to have years of experience to utilize them. The real benefit of the platforms is that it enables the non-technical staff to create the advanced apps by themselves. Those people are also called “citizen developers.” Probably, the engagement of IT assistance will become the thing of the past.
Development Speed
Surely, today’s business world requires everything to be created faster than ever. So, speed is the most critical benefit of providing the low-code platforms. Using visual tools, developers can build and deploy new apps in days or hours at digital speed.
High Productivity
Basically, low-code development is an approach for developers to get more things done. Implementing it, you will get rid of small tasks, which is an obvious benefit, and spend more time creating complex and mission-critical projects.
Building Once and Deploying Everywhere
The need for mobile applications drive development innovation a lot because users need to operate easily through multiple devices. With low-code development, this becomes possible with no extra coding or resources. There is a cross-platform functionality in the design of apps. As a result, it provides one more benefit — the customer experience is equally smooth across desktop, tablet or smartphone.
For sure, with all these key benefits, companies can be well-armed to quickly adapt to fast-changing business conditions and gain more success on the market. Nevertheless, there are many other ways to realize all your creative ideas. Our Drupal website maintenance team can also help you accomplish tasks and projects easily and quickly. Contact us!