What is a Low-Code/No-Code Platform?

Here are a few screenshots demonstrating the above:

The first two screenshots show how one creates an application, its associated objects, the attributes and fields for each object and, finally, the relationships and cardinality between objects:

And here is how a simple application renders on a desktop, a Samsung Android smartphone and an iPad Mini tablet, respectively. This application lists travel destinations with hotels and flights in a 1 to n relationship and has been pre-populated with sample data.

Built-in Services

As mentioned above, the next big advantage of a low-code/no-code platform comes from the large set of built-in services.

As we just saw, the platform provides responsive and adaptive UI for multiple devices but it also includes built-in themes, UI blueprints, white labeling, support for multi-national markets (multi-lingual, including left-to-right and right-to-left support for languages like Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew), user management (self registration, provisioning, password management, etc.), custom reporting capabilities and document creation from your application data in various formats.

At the back-end level, the platform provides a strong security and permission model (authentication, authorization, role attribution and auditing); data connectivity such as import/export capabilities, search and indexing; workflow control; and built-in integration with various email systems and authentication providers (SAML, ADFS, OpenID Connect, LDAP, Kerberos).

For cloud-centric environments, it provides services like multi-tenancy (complete isolation for multi-customers on same instance for reduced cost) and marketplace for applications distribution.

In the interest of keeping this article short, I won’t get into the details of each service, but it is important to recognize when your initial applications are successful and the requirements start to pile up, these built-in services will come in handy and save your team a considerable amount of time.

What Makes Low-Code/No-Code Platforms so Attractive?

There are many reasons why these platforms are emerging and are successful, most notably, because they address the following real business needs:

• Need for agility and delivery speed to show relevance and innovation (to be able to start small, fail fast or grow and scale quickly)

• Need for modernization at low cost, in particular to unlock data from legacy apps

• Lack of skilled workers and the ever increasing number of technologies and frameworks developers have to keep up with

• Too many applications do not get built (according to Gartner 80 to 85% of IT budget is spent on maintenance)

In conclusion, a low-code/no-code platform really shines not only when you want to build applications rapidly, but also when you need to accelerate delivery and scale as demand rises. Whether you want to modernize existing applications, reduce your IT backlog or create brand new multi-devices applications in the cloud, you should investigate how a low-code/no-code platform can empower your organization’s agility and capacity to quickly and inexpensively innovate.