In recent years, the trend of low-code development as a software development method has been prominent. According to statistics, the low-code development market is expected to achieve a substantial growth rate of 28.1% by 2025, reaching a value of 45.5 billion US dollars. This significant growth demonstrates the clear preference for low-code platforms across industries and applications of all sizes.
At the same time, the topic of low-code is raging. Many people compare low-code development with traditional IT development. They may think that low-code is just a concept of hype, which is essentially the same as traditional IT development; The quality is low, and the traditional IT team is still required for development, etc. Is this really the case? What is the difference between traditional IT development and low-code development? Let's make a simple comparison below.
Low-code development refers to a visual development approach that enables development teams to create applications with minimal manual coding. It provides a graphical interface and pre-built components designed to simplify the process, time, and cost of building an enterprise management system, lower the threshold for building an enterprise management system, and allow developers or non-technical personnel to quickly build and deploy applications to achieve Quickly realize the purpose of system construction.
Traditional IT development is based on the development mode centered on "handwritten code throughout the process". Professional IT technicians implement software systems or system software construction projects through code writing according to user needs. The whole process includes requirements capture, requirements analysis, design, implementation and Testing and other links, so the development cycle is generally longer.
Compared with the traditional software system development process, low-code development shortens the 6 links of traditional software development to 3 links. The product features of fast landing, fast launch, and fast iteration eliminate the lengthy development process of traditional software, such as LeaRun The low-code platform, as a general-purpose low-code development tool for the entire technology stack, can be built and used immediately, delivered quickly, and greatly shortened the construction cycle.
From the perspective of target developers, traditional development usually requires proficiency in multiple programming languages and frameworks, so the technical requirements for developers are high, such as IT technicians serving professional IT departments, including programmers, project managers, and implementation consultants etc.; while low-code development simplifies these processes to a certain extent, allowing developers to build applications through visual interfaces and drag-and-drop components, and also write some codes to build or modify complex applications. Therefore, It does not require high technical requirements for developers, and only requires a small amount of additional expertise or personnel support.
From the perspective of technical characteristics, traditional development is model-driven. Every time an application is built, a large amount of code needs to be written. The code is highly repetitive and will not be automatically generated; The application system is built in the way of "least handwritten code". More than 80% of the code can be generated through the pre-set code package of the platform. Through visual operations such as dragging and dropping components, the application can be built with only a small amount of code or no code, without writing tedious and repetitive boilerplate code.
From the perspective of application scenarios, traditional IT development framework logic is written one by one, which can meet various system and software requirements on the market; while the low-code platform development team aggregates the industry process logic framework that has been carefully crafted, and code logic based on The process logic of all walks of life is checked and filled, and then the perfect code is transformed into components that everyone can understand and operate, so as to realize the purpose of the enterprise to quickly build a management system, and the enterprise can also according to its own business needs, or Process characteristics, add and delete system functions by dragging and dropping, can basically meet the management needs of enterprises.
The emergence of low-code is not to subvert traditional IT development, but to alleviate the contradiction between traditional IT development and market digitalization needs. The two are neither hostile nor iterative, but a matter of market choice and the ultimate goal All are to assist enterprises to keep up with the wave of digital construction and realize the development of enterprises to a new stage.