No-Code Low-code Platform. In continuation with my earlier blog wherein we discussed the effects and side effects of loose coupling and some of the remedies for its side effects, here is one more important topic I would like to deal with today.
Being an era of startups, characterized more specifically by product development with a galore of technology choices and wide range of frameworks within the same technology, it becomes chaotic and challenging to choose the right technology and right framework . Similarly, one needs rapid prototyping for exploring the interest of investors etc. On the other hand, there are migration projects where again one needs to have a correct choice which will make the new version scalable for at least a decade if not more. Here, the migration of legacy framework to new, cutting edge framework needs lot of investment in building the mundane master entities into a new code.
While it takes lot of efforts to decide on the technology, the next problem one faces is to spring board the effort of initial structure building and building of the masters. The project becomes nimble after this time consuming phase of spring boarding and by the time deadlines already start pressurizing the development team and then begins the saga of hard work, late night sitting, and week end working. The team gets tired and hence naturally leads itself to quality issues, re –working, incomplete features and so on. Project manager gets frustrated with the time lines so as the client and finally it ends up in a lose- lose relationship.
So what if the initial spring boarding time is reduced drastically? The benefit will be huge. Sprints can actually start with more focus on complex features and most importantly the mundane is over and real excitement of development can start immediately without wasting any energy of development unit. One of the options to bring this into reality is to automate the masters so that its back end and UI can be generated on a click. There are multiple products available in the market which are doing automation, however, there are some key gaps in those as follows.
1) Most of the code generator platforms create lot of junk code which is not required.
2) Most of the platforms are command line based so some technical skills are required to use them.
3) The editing of generated code after kick off is not provided.
4) The intuition in the UI is missing.
5) The need of the hour is also to generate some analytics out of the projects worked on which is not there.
6) Entity based pricing makes it flexible and out of the box for clients.
Apart from the gaps mentioned above, it is equally important that any code generator tool should be a helping hand and should not occupy the driver’s seat instead. This is because every line of code written is the pride of every developer working on it. Also many product companies or rather almost all would always try to have some proprietary element in the code as their trade secret. However development of master entities with their CRUD is a real no brainer and nobody takes pride in developing the same as there is no trade secret in it. So master’s development has to be automated.
Automating of the master generation code has many advantages, such as:
1) It saves the CRUD development time and hence cost.
2) It saves the testing time of the CRUD which is again a no brainer time for testers.
3) It saves the code review time of senior developers or review teams.
4) It naturally reduces the spring board time and allows jump starting of the actual development.
5) It ultimately makes the project delivery very much predictable.
Very easy to create a new full web app in minutes with awesome UI and master operation with user management from the backend.