The Many Flavors of “Low-Code”

In this article in InfoQ, Bonitasoft CEO Miguel Valdes Faura offers a perspective on how low-code platforms have evolved, and why and how empowering professional developers with low-code to all-code is important for creating enterprise quality applications.

Key takeaways:

• The real power of low-code platforms is not to enable citizen developers, but to empower professional developers by providing technology, frameworks and methodologies that reduce the need to code.
• There are two provenances of low-code platforms: workflow-based and code-generation.
• The low-code platform ecosystem is quite diverse, combining various combinations of eight key, overlapping aspects, including execution approach, architectural approach, deployment options, and persona targeted.
• There are five essential aspects of low-code platforms that support heterogenous technical teams: extensibility, scalability, DevOps capability, deployment options, graphical tooling / coding options.
• To select the right low-code platform for a technical team, it’s important to understand the tools, extension points, integration capabilities, API's, underlying technologies and continuous integration and deployment options it provides.