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What is low-code?

I’ve been working with DSLs since 2009, but I’ve recently become aware of the term low code. Looking at Wikipedia, it seems the term first appears in a Forrester report from 2014. Prior to that there were application development (RAP) and fourth-generation programming languages. The idea was always the same: improve the development speed by having more high level tools. So, what are these platforms and what do they do? First, I would like two consider two things: the abstract view and the commercial view of these platforms.

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Risks when your low code app becomes too complex

Low code sounds like a great idea but there are some caveats. One of those problems are that applications, over time, tend to grow in features, complexity, and corner cases.

IT professionals have the tools to deal with such problems, for example:

  • version control
  • continuous deployment/continuous integration
  • unit testing
  • production, staging, and development environments
  • refactoring

The risk that you might encounter when creating a low code application on some platform is that your application becomes so large and complex, that you end up needing this kind of tools in you low code application platform. Some platforms already include such features, others not. If you are building your own, you should carefully consider if you need or will need to include those concepts.

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What is being done with low-code in the industry?

You might have heard of the term low-code, specially if you read this blog. But what can be done with low code? Can I use a low code solution that is already in the market, or should I create my own solution for my business needs? Let us try to answer these two questions.

What can be done with low code?

First, low code is used to create or build software. This software can be something as simple as a set of rules that are applied when an event happens or a full fledged web or mobile app. Let us looks at the marketing materials that we find in the websites of well known low code platforms. Each item contains the name of the tool next to an excerpt of their web site copy that says what you can do with it:

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A tale of two tools

Recently I had two epiphanies in the tooling I use.

The first one happened as I was tired of my development environment being too slow when I was developing on Windows. I have a very powerful Mac Book Pro with a lot of RAM and an SSD hard disk, I did not spare any money on my main working tool. For my virtualization needs I was using Virtual Box, the free virtualization software from Oracle. I considered Boot Camp as the obvious choice to have the maximum raw power, but two things discouraged me:

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