one. foreword
2022 will be an extraordinary year for the field of low-code development. From the emergence of the unicorn company OutSystems at the end of 2019 with a valuation of more than 1 billion US dollars, to the entry of Microsoft and Google in 2020, and finally to the open and secret struggles of various domestic development platform manufacturers, this will mean that the low-code platform will definitely be in the next few years. It is the hottest product in the market.
two. History of low-code platforms
According to Gartner's forecast, the market's demand for application development will be five times the capacity of IT companies in 2022 . To fill this output gap, low-code/zero-code technology is currently the only viable solution, and more and more companies are bound to introduce this technology. Forrester states that more than 75% of applications will be developed in low-code/zero-code platforms in 2020. What is the specific low-code development platform? What exactly is the difference between it and a development tool?
This definition is given in Wikipedia: Low-code development platform (LCDP: Low-code development platform) A low-code development platform (LCDP) is software that provides an environment programmers use to create application software through graphical user interfaces and configuration instead of traditional computer programming.
It can be seen from the above definition that low-code development first provides a set of software, and secondly, it is for programmers. It can only save programmers' development time and improve development efficiency. But is the low-code development platform a concept that has only emerged in recent years? In fact, it is not. As early as 2014, someone had defined the concept of low-code development, and the entire field of low-code development can be traced back to the earlier fourth-generation programming languages and rapid application development tools.
In 2014, the well-known research institution Forrester formally proposed the concept of low-code development and devoted itself to the research of the platform. And more than ten years ago, many software companies with extraordinary eyes have already set foot in the field of low-code development, such as foreign Salesforce (founded in 1999), OutSystems (founded in 2001), Mendix (founded in 2005) , and domestic MyApps (founded in 2006) .
At the end of 2019, the China Software Industry Association believed that the domestic low-code field is still in its early stages, and the market demand will increase sharply in the future. With the continuous expansion of low-code application scenarios, more enterprises or enterprise information service providers will adopt low-code development platforms with lower technical thresholds and higher development efficiency in 2020, and tailor-made enterprise core systems to meet their needs. Personalized enterprise management needs.
3. Engine-based low-code platform
Low-code platforms on the market are mainly divided into two models. One is the form-driven mode, and the other is the model mode, but the current mainstream is still based on the engine-based low-code platform. Take the report as an example. The so-called engine mode refers to designing a report template through the report designer and publishing it to the report engine. At runtime, you only need to pass relevant parameters to the report engine, such as report conditions, and the report engine is responsible for querying the database. , process the data, and then display it in various ways. In this process, developers do not need to write codes, nor generate source codes. Even in the development process, when using the development platform to develop business systems, developers do not need to code, they only need to customize the parameters through the page, and these parameters are stored in the system database or XML files. When the system is running, the engine will call these parameters for page display and business processing.
The main successful representative of this rapid development platform is the Guangzhou Tianling myApps flexible software platform . Their products completely adopt the engine model, and they can quickly produce ERP, OA, CRM, HRM, EAM, BI, PMS and other software without knowing technology or writing code, saving 80% of cost and time.
Four. Conclusion
The progress of any productivity is not smooth sailing; the birth of any product cannot be achieved overnight; any company cannot become a unicorn enterprise in one step. Guangzhou Tianling, as one of the first manufacturers in China to set foot in the field of low-code development, has been deeply involved in the field of low-code development for 16 years, and is committed to creating a product that empowers enterprises.
Mr. Zhou Zhijun, the founder of Tianling Company, once said: "Remove the program grammar and keep the program logic". Perhaps millions of people have had this idea, and less than ten thousand people have seriously thought about how to realize it, and less than a thousand people have actually implemented this idea. There are less than a hundred people who have persisted for many years and are still investing, and there are only a few people who actually make usable products.