Understand the challenges that plague Enterprise IT and how to tackle them using Bimodal IT. Learn how WaveMaker can ignite digital innovation by powering Bimodal IT.

Enterprise IT challenges

Customer interaction with Business have changed. Customers today connect via mobile devices, plugged into the social network, and doing their own research. “bring your own device” (BYOD) concept is being adopted and employees prefer toutilize tablets and mobile phones to improve productivity.

CIOs are pondering thought to deal with the New Normal

• Users are demanding fast and engaging enterprise applications that go beyond providing merely a utilitarian experience
• Employees are now using more than one device for their work and expect enterprise applications to work well across different form factors.
• Employees and partners expect a seamless integrations across applications due to API-driven experiences in the consumer world.
• Business teams want to broaden innovation by making app creation possible for non-developers too.
• Traditional application delivery can rarely get to all of the custom apps that the business needs causing business units to create their own apps, resulting in shadow IT.
• Many organizations are dealing with shrinking IT budgets due to the current economic climate and constant focus on increasing revenues—without additional investment.

The time for Digital transformation has arrived.

Enterprise IT teams are looking at utilizing modern technology platforms to drive digital transformation and innovation that would allow them to solve business problems, transform business needs into realization via apps (web, mobile), digitize experiences and operations.

What is Bimodal IT?

There are different perspectives on how to approach enterprise IT spending and overall effort to achieve application delivery nirvana. One of the most popular methodology to understand where the app delivery cycle fits into the overall IT process is Bimodal IT.

According to Gartner, Bimodal IT is “the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility” so that CIOs can help their departments meet the digital challenge, and ultimately bring the enterprise along.

Under Bimodal IT, organizations of the future will have two separate IT flavors:

Mode 1 (conventional), which is traditional IT, focused on stability and efficiency

Mode 2 (nonlinear), which is an experimental, agile organization focused on time-to-market, rapid application evolution, and, in particular, tight alignment with business units.

If you were to look at Bimodal IT from the perspective of Pace-Layered Architecture, Systems of Innovation and Systems of Differentiation, which tend to have less governance and a faster rate of change, will fall under Mode 2.

WaveMaker’s 2 pass Development -a perfect fir for Bimodal IT

WaveMaker, Inc. proposes 2-pass development as a new app development methodology that can be used with any low-code platform to do away with all the application development challenges.

2-pass development approach, as it says, has 2 passes in app development- a business pass and a technical pass. The Business pass is driven by a team comprising of non-technical business developers who build their apps using a low-code platform like WaveMaker. A Technical Pass, driven by a team comprising of technical experts and developers write the code and wrap them as visual components, that can be used by the Business Pass team to build apps.

WaveMaker ignites digital innovation by powering Bimodal IT

Gartner states, by 2017, 75% of IT organizations will have a Bimodal capability but only half of those organizations will succeed. WaveMaker enables enterprises with a two-pronged approach:

Innovate: Enable business units to build their own apps but on technologies sanctioned by IT

Renovate: Migrate existing long tail applications by liberating them from proprietary technologies using proven modernization techniques and platforms.

WaveMaker’s software platform revolutionizes how enterprises build, deliver and manage modern custom applications, improving business agility and fostering innovation.

WaveMaker leverages the latest trends and technologies in Rapid Application Development (RAD) such as multi-device auto-responsive interfaces and componentized app assembly, Docker for app-optimized container deployment on private infrastructures, and APIs and Microservices Architecture (MSA) for scalable integration.

How to pick a low-code platform that aligns with your enterprise web applications strategy

Despite the explosion in number of low-code platforms, they broadly fall into two categories: A, Citizen developer platforms that help IT-aware business folks to rapidly build good looking digital office apps, most using popular platform APIs. And B, Process automation studios for assembling sophisticated workflows and creating workflow-based apps using connectors and such. All low-code platforms uniformly promise, and deliver, great looking UI out of the box – the main hook for citizen developers.

However, the ease of building snazzy line-of-business apps, and the resultant “gold rush”, has led to many silo-ed projects across the enterprise. Over time, this has raised the cost burden of long term use of low-code, but more critically, it has compromised on scalability, security, and performance. As a result, such apps have fallen out of alignment with the enterprise’s web applications strategy.

Having said that, the right low-code platform can accelerate your enterprise web strategy. Let’s begin.]

1. Does it generate real code behind?
   

   An open standards low-code platform that generates human-readable application code (“Code Behind”) finds instant synergy with professional development teams, who don’t like to sacrifice features for ease of development.
   (Avoid Code Lock-In – can the auto-generated code be extended and customized?)

2. Is it purpose-built behind for professional developers?

   Developer experience is key to low-code acceptance among professional developers. Look for extensible factory components and the ability to hand-code advanced features – giving teams full-stack capability.

3. Does it follow architectural best practices and generate extensible frameworks?

   Does it give you access to best-of-breed technologies, enable modern architectural best practices, and provide a well-thought-out development methodology?

4. Does it help build scalable apps that are as good as, or better than, hand-coded?

   Low-code apps should be as good as hand-crafted ones: enterprise-grade performance and the ability to scale out with microservices as the number of features and volume of users grow.

   (Avoid Platform Lock-In. Can you run applications on the infrastructure of your choice?)

5. Is the licensing model affordable & scalable?

   A bad license model can choke your growth. Choose an affordable and uncomplicated license model that is based on developer seats, and does not inhibit the complexity or number of apps you want to build.

   (Avoid Business Lock-In. Is the licensing and pricing option future-proof?)

6. Does it minimize your risk and accelerate digital transformation efforts?

   Look for a technology partner who can lower the risk when there is uncertainty, accelerate delivery of fast-changing apps, and has an engineering support plan that takes the load off your IT team. Does it reduce the risk of investment normally

   associated with full-stack teams and traditional dev projects?

Combine the speed of low-code with the power of custom code

WaveMaker is the low-code platform of choice for professional development teams across the globe.

What are responsive, hybrid, and native applications?

Responsive apps

Responsive web design emerged as a new way of building websites and web apps that adapt their UI to the size of the current browser window. This became possible with fluid grid layouts, flexible images, and media queries. While responsive web design is highly suitable for websites, data-oriented apps may not find it very suitable. The app needs to be opened through a browser URL and not the typical fashion of a mobile installed app. More importantly, the apps cannot leverage device capabilities resulting in a less engaging experience.

Hybrid Apps

Hybrid Apps are built using HTML5, just the way a Responsive Web App would be developed and then packaged into a thin native container and libraries that provide access to native features of the device. That way, Hybrid Apps combine the best of Native and Responsive Web Apps. They are built using familiar web technologies, but run like a typical Mobile App and use device capabilities. Not only does Hybrid App development offer better use of available skills and people, but also the ability to build Apps that follow UI guidelines of the device platform.

Native Apps

Native apps provide the best experience on mobile devices, as they are specially built to the platform/OS. Each mobile platform has its own development tool and SDKs, which enables professional developers to build native apps leveraging device or platform-specific features. The problem with native apps is that you need to develop individually for each platform (iOS or Android or Windows), using different technologies (Objective-C or Swift for iOS, or Java for Android) making it an expensive proposition. Hence, native apps are suitable for consumer-facing apps or games.

Why go hybrid?

Companies looking to build intuitive UIs; along with lowering the development efforts, opt for the hybrid model of app development

• For serious apps: Best for enterprises looking to build simple or complex business apps
• To save cost of development: No compromise on cost control across the development cycle
• To reduce development effort: Highest level of efficiency for your developers, giving them room to innovate
• To leverage multi-channel capabilities: Utilize web or mobile platforms based on the application of your applications

Why go hybrid with WaveMaker?

Hybrid apps built on our platform give a near-native experience on all mobile operating systems

• For easier development: Inbuilt layouts, themes, prefabs, and templates that conform to the OS guidelines
• For higher security: Comprehensive security solutions that adhere to best practices and compliance standards across industries
• For continuous deployment and testing: Instant preview, edit, and testing of applications on the fly in any stage of development iterations
• For seamless access to device features: Simplification access and use of device features like camera, location, network, battery, contacts, local storage, and more

Make data more digestible

A byte about visual modeling and programming

Visual modeling and visual programming techniques transform numbers into visual elements such as charts, maps, graphs, and tables using standard graphical notations. Data visualization is crucial in supporting real-time decision making and has become a core feature in modern application development platforms. Visual modeling and programming not only allow you to build a model of your system or application, but also to model systems easier, faster and more accurately on the front-end, while maintaining the syntaxes and semantics at the back-end.

Try Model-Driven Development

Today’s software and application demands require a ready-to-use foundation before anything is built on it. To eliminate iterations in your application development lifecycle, a powerful approach is to adopt model-driven development. By using a model as a starting point to describe your business semantics and then generating application artifacts from that model, you can deliver applications faster with higher productivity.

What low-code platforms have brought to the table in terms of visual modeling and programming, is easy-to-use, drag and drop features, and customizable widgets, helping you to create critical and device-agnostic applications with responsive dashboards.

Whether it is full or partial dependency, find out what type of Model-Driven App Development Approach suits your business and application development needs.

Achieve data visualization with minimal coding

Take Visual Modeling and Programming to Next Level Using Low-Code

“It took a single developer 1 week to build an entire application!” Find out how low-code addressed a real-world problem using visual modelling techniques.

The Low-Code Leverage

Advantages of using WaveMaker for visual modeling and programming

Visual programming and visual modeling just got easier. You can instantly create a chart, plot a map, or build a dashboard to visualize data from any source using WaveMaker. By using built-in widgets and prefabs, you can build applications within days without any need for coding.

Ensure high quality of code

Incorporating the best practices followed by professional Java or Javascript developers, WaveMaker guarantees best code quality, maintainability and extensibility for enterprise application use.

Automate code generation

Taking a radically different approach to use open-standards based generated code, the WaveMaker platform automatically generates code for every action performed via drag & drop features.

Lower costs

Experience significant reduction in development and maintenance costs. Enterprises using the WaveMaker platform for application development have, in some cases, lowered maintenance costs up to 75%.

Modern enterprise needs have transformed with increasing demand from the digital workforce, agile operations, and the tech-savvy marketplace. While the decades old, traditional SDLC software development is a robust approach, new development methodologies such as rapid application development (RAD) is revamping the blueprint of modern enterprises to include agile processes.

With mobile application development gaining speed, traditional methods of software development fall short of fulfilling demands. SDLC is time intensive, it allows for minimum iterations, there is little user interaction and requires high coding efforts. In alignment with the change in pace of enterprise needs, RAD offers a simpler approach to application development, one that requires minimal coding and is highly flexible. The answer to which approach works best is based on the enterprise needs. There is a gradual yet rapid transition from traditional software development to modern RAD. The balancing act is in blending high code for complex and core enterprise applications with low-code for rapid application development.

What is a RAD Platform?

The Rapid Application Development approach relies on rapid cycles of iterative development, prototyping, reiterative user testing and the re-use of software components. A RAD platform accelerates visual development with out-of-the-box themes, templates, widgets, and responsive designs while generating standards-based front-end code. It allows for seamless, secure, and scalable integration to standard enterprise systems with an API-centric approach. It also supports continuous, flexible, and one-click deployment without lock-in and CI/CD of your choice. Delve into the process of a Rapid Application Development Model.

Modern RAD vs. Traditional SDLC

Understand the difference to create a balance between High Code and Low-Code

>With the accelerating pace of digital transformation, enterprise IT and business users are increasingly observing the importance of rapid application development. As development teams grapple with traditional software development, rapid application development supports custom app development and reduces the friction points to deliver successful transformation. Find out more about the Benefits of Rapid Application Development.

Combine the Speed of Low-Code with the Power of Custom Code

Explore the features of WaveMaker’s RAD Platform

WaveMaker’s RAD platform helps you build, integrate, secure and deploy enterprise-grade applications. Build applications visually with powerful components, create modern responsive interfaces, and design interfaces easily using out-of-the-box widgets, templates and themes.
Easily integrate with your database, API ecosystem or any systems of record. Generate readable code that you can own and modify in future with no lock-in. Create custom UI components from existing widget building blocks and enable re-use across applications by bringing together 3rd party frameworks with business logic. Generate your application APIs and enable microservice based deployments.

Take a Deep Dive into the WaveMaker’s RAD Platform Architecture

Enterprises that used WaveMaker’s RAD Platform have experienced:

67% faster application development than traditional software delivery

80% lesser coding required compared to traditional software development

75% lower maintenance costs than traditional software life cycle

The cloud computing market has grown into a complex ecosystem of cloud-enabled technology and services. The portion of enterprise IT spend dedicated to cloud computing is increasing. By 2022, worldwide public cloud service market will grow to $331.2 billion, spending on Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) is predicted to increase to $76.6 billion, Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) to $31.8 billion, and Cloud Application Services (SaaS) to $143.7 billion. Gartner

By making the shift to cloud application development, enterprises can benefit from on-demand computing resource power, pay-as-you-go features, easy scalability, to the use of the latest technology stack.

Shades of Cloud Computing Services

Enterprises that are further along the road of digital transformation that are looking for ways to add business value by enhancing capabilities are revamping application development and delivery models. To rebuild applications to be fully cloud-native, they are running PaaS layers in containers instead of lifting and shifting to IaaS.

What’s the difference between aPaaS and PaaS and the capabilities that define it? Find out.

Make data more digestible

A byte about visual modeling and programming

Visual modeling and visual programming techniques transform numbers into visual elements such as charts, maps, graphs, and tables using standard graphical notations. Data visualization is crucial in supporting real-time decision making and has become a core feature in modern application development platforms. Visual modeling and programming not only allow you to build a model of your system or application, but also to model systems easier, faster and more accurately on the front-end, while maintaining the syntaxes and semantics at the back-end.

Try Model-Driven Development

Today’s software and application demands require a ready-to-use foundation before anything is built on it. To eliminate iterations in your application development lifecycle, a powerful approach is to adopt model-driven development. By using a model as a starting point to describe your business semantics and then generating application artifacts from that model, you can deliver applications faster with higher productivity.

What low-code platforms have brought to the table in terms of visual modeling and programming, is easy-to-use, drag and drop features, and customizable widgets, helping you to create critical and device-agnostic applications with responsive dashboards.

Whether it is full or partial dependency, find out what type of Model-Driven App Development Approach suits your business and application development needs.

Achieve data visualization with minimal coding

Take Visual Modeling and Programming to Next Level Using Low-Code

“It took a single developer 1 week to build an entire application!” Find out how low-code addressed a real-world problem using visual modelling techniques.

The Low-Code Leverage

Advantages of using WaveMaker for visual modeling and programming

Visual programming and visual modeling just got easier. You can instantly create a chart, plot a map, or build a dashboard to visualize data from any source using WaveMaker. By using built-in widgets and prefabs, you can build applications within days without any need for coding.

Explore the expectations and challenges of modern web application development and learn how you can deliver Custom enterprise web applications better with WaveMaker.

Enterprises have a perennial requirement to develop applications either for their internal needs or for their clients. When the word “enterprise” and “application” are combined, it is a software designed for a large business which is complex in nature as it has to integrate or interface with current applications within the enterprise which needs to be deployed on either the internet, intranet and corporate networks while maintaining strict security demands in the process.

Today’s enterprises have needs to build custom web application easily, quickly and securely. Applications need to be agile and versatile to work on both web and mobile devices. These requirements has spawned the emergence of modern web application development platforms.

How to Improve Enterprise Web Application Development

• Higher costs in development, man-power and maintenance
• Greater effort in coding with the rigidity of traditional development
• Increased cycle times for development, testing and deployment
• High maintenance due to the lack of reusability which also increases costs
• A potentially unhappy customer

Low-code web development platforms vs Traditional application development

The fundamental expectation from a low-code app development platform is to offer a WYSIWYG development environment where developers can drag and drop components to design responsive user interfaces that adapt to a device’s screen resolution. With a low-code application development platform, enterprises will experience flexibility in their application development stages, with versatility offered with both developer and business user inputs. With easy testing of the application at each stage, customers can be looped in at all times providing a transparent and interactive application build.

The key areas where a low-code platforms trumps traditional app development are,

• Reduction of costs by over 50% in development, man-power and maintenance
• 80% lesser coding required compared to traditional software development
• Enterprises will see 67% faster application development cycle times
• Easy maintenance with better reusability of code

2-Pass web development framework

2-pass development is a new app development methodology that can be used with a low-code platform, to do away with all the app dev challenges where there is a disconnect between the technology and the business imperative. The idea is to involve the business stakeholders like product managers and business analysts as part of the development process to maintain harmony and optimize the entire app building experience.

2-pass development approach, is like a baton transfer in relay between two runners. Only, in this case it is application development. It consists of a business pass and a technical pass.

Business Pass 

Anytime an app is to be developed, the requirements are passed on to the Business pass team comprising of business stakeholders like product managers and business analysts and we group them as “RAD Developers”. They gather the app requirements and start to build the app using a low-code platform. The app building is usually creation of the user interface with live/test data, using visual app building experience provided by the platform. Visual app building involves simple drag and drop for UI building, connections to various systems like DB, LDAP and ERP and 1-click deployment into various environments like QA, staging and production among a host of other rapid development features. However, there will invariably be some app requirements that are not available out of the box and needs to be customized for the specific app. These are the requirements that will be passed on to the technical pass team to be taken care of. For instance, a particular customized UI widget that is not available out of the box, would be requested to be built by the technical pass team.

Technical Pass 

Technical team accomplishes two purposes. First, they create all the generic visual reusable components that are needed for the app building by the Business pass team. Second, they create the specific app requirements that comes from the Business pass team and they quickly get back to them. Members of the technical pass team are professional developers who specialize in front-end, back-end and integration(API) development.

Advantages over traditional application development

• In a traditional approach, the business aspect involved in the application build is only during the start of the project rather at regular intervals. Using a 2-Pass approach, the business team is always in the loop during the build which enables a holistically built custom web application
• Integrations & testing can be cumbersome, time consuming and tedious using a traditional format of web application development as most of this takes place in individual silos. In a 2-pass approach, the business team would hand over to the technical team only when there is a need for customization. Integration and testing cycles are minimized as the business team is familiar with low-code platforms and conduct these operations with ease.
• 2- pass development philosophy works well with Agile development methods. You can actively collaborate using the same low-code platform to achieve the project goal. In a traditional approach, this would be difficult due to its rigidity.

Web Application Development
Technologies and Frameworks

Having web application development platforms that are built on open technologies and frameworks allows flexibility and makes them developer friendly as developers don’t need to break sweat learning new technologies.

Front-end technologies

Web application development platforms that offer app development using front end technologies consisting of Angular and Bootstrap, which provides a framework of building responsive web applications, offer the best-of-breed approach to web application development.

Back-end technologies/frameworks

On the back-end, these platforms use Java, Spring and Hibernate which are trusted, open standard frameworks used by millions or developers and are enterprise friendly to develop custom web applications. These open standards-based frameworks creates an environment for an enterprise to build applications rapidly without being bothered about any vendor lock-ins as the code generated can modified by full-stack developers. It can be easily extended or maintained using any other popular IDE or text editor as well.

 

About WaveMaker

WaveMaker is a Rapid App Development Platform that is the most open, extensible and flexible low-code platform that is designed to help you create good looking enterprise grade web applications quickly, easily and securely for any device.

Modern enterprise application needs have become intricate. They demand application development and deployment to be cloud-native, agile, scalable, and secure. The app ecosystem has become intertwined, and enterprise applications have become complex beasts, built on monolithic systems. The transformation continues. Modern application development is becoming more agile and scalable and deployment of applications on the cloud is increasing. Application architecture is transforming from monolithic to microservice-oriented architecture. Developers and IT Ops are collaborating giving rise to the culture of DevOps. With the increasing pressure on high performance, DevOps teams are urged to use more sophisticated technology and techniques.

Besides achieving agility and scalability, DevOps teams are also entrusted with achieving enterprise application security goals. App Security has become a high-priority goal and a shared responsibility. It’s reflected in Gartner’s “Magic Quadrant for Application Security Testing, 2020” report, there’s a 50% increase in the number of end-user and client conversations about AST (Application Security Testing) tools and DevSecOps in 2020.

To embed application security across the development cycle requires various levels of automation testing and setting up of configurations at different stages of the application development and deployment process. What development teams are doing is that they are using container technology and microservices to “pull security” early into the DevOps process. In addition to application security, another trend highlighted in Gartner’s report is the increasing attention (of 65%) on container security.

While many enterprises are already running cloud-native, microservices-based, containerized applications in production, there are several challenges; from technology immaturity, a steep learning curve, to the lack of operational expertise and know-how. What’s taking precedence today in high-performance development teams is the left-shift application security earlier in the stages of development.

“Shift Left” App Security – The Guiding Force Behind High-Performance Development Teams

App Security has become a business imperative. In Forrester’s Report on “The Top Security Technology Trends To Watch, 2020”, integration of application security tools with CI/CD pipeline is a major priority in 2020. Application security has become the primary focus of high-performance DevOps teams and by “left-shift application security” parameters, security is a shared responsibility and is being implemented by developers. Moreover, with the rise of DevSecOps the silos of application and infrastructure security are being bridged.

AppSec – The Primary Focus of DevOps in a Containerized Environment

DevOps teams not only have to mitigate operational issues related to performance, integrity, availability of containers in production environments, they also need to ensure security is embedded early in the DevOps process. With greater urgency to automate application security testing (AST) in the DevOps process, the attention of DevOps teams needs to be directed towards the integration of the CI/CD toolchain with application security tools such as software composition analysis (SCA), static application security testing (SAST), and container security.

When embracing the DevOps culture and migrating applications to the cloud in a containerized environment, security must be embedded across the development lifecycle. To ensure compliance of performance and resiliency, the focus needs to shift to service-level and container-specific monitoring. DevOps teams need to monitor applications within containers and across containers at a service level. “Pulling in” application security earlier into the development lifecycle would form the beginning of what is called DevSecOps.

DevSecOps – Breaking the Silo of Application and Infrastructure Security

The ‘mantra’ of DevSecOps is “shift left”, encouraging developers to move security from the right end of the development and delivery process to the left end (beginning). True to its abbreviation, DevSecOps – development, security, and operations – ensures the integration of security is automated across the lifecycle, from application design, testing, deployment, and delivery.

With the essence of DevSecOps being “software, safer, sooner”, it enables seamless integration of application and infrastructure security with the DevOps process. By allowing developers to address enterprise application security issues earlier before the application goes into production, it makes security issues easier to fix without disrupting the development cycle. Breaking the security silo, DevSecOps makes security a shared responsibility of IT Ops, security, and development teams.

Integrating security and testing across the development lifecycle may seem like a daunting challenge. However, there are emerging technology and tools available to ensure security is pulled in early enough. Low-code platforms give enterprises the leverage to embedded security when developing cloud-native applications, managing containers, and adopting microservices-based architecture. To implement the practice of DevSecOps, low-code gives the opportunity to address and improve application security across the development lifecycle.

The Window of Opportunity – How Low-Code Enables Enterprises to “Shift Left” Application Security 

Low-code platforms help enterprises by integrating application-level, security features such as authorization, authentication, auditability, certification, performance monitoring, and security architecture, across the application development lifecycle. By automating application-level security features, low-code platforms ensure robust authorization and authentication systems that have built-in encryption and provide XSS and CSRF configurations to address security threats and vulnerabilities. To help developers configure security features when building applications, low-code platforms provide fine-grained controls, built-in encryption options, comprehensive authentication and authorization processes, OWASP compliance support, and data protection.

While application development and deployment processes are transforming so is application architecture, which is moving from monolithic legacy systems to microservices-based architecture. With microservices, there are many hands-on the deck. Enterprise applications are made into smaller components and many developers are working on different functionalities at various stages of the development cycle. At this time, when application architecture is transforming, security goals remain unchanged. In fact, the demands for enterprise application security are heightened and they need to be imbibed in the development process. Low-code platforms support microservices-based architecture and enable the “left-shift application security” of security parameters by allowing developers to configure security protocols, set privileges, and automate testing before the application goes into production. Moreover, as enterprises leverage next-generation app delivery tools such as container technology, low-code platforms help to embrace containerization at scale without disruption in existing processes and without requiring the reskilling of existing resources.

Low-code’s promise is that of “Zero Complexity” DevOps Automation. It ensures minimal disruption of existing development teams, enables on-premise and cloud deployments seamlessly, automates CI/CD processes, saves on security infrastructure costs, and enables DevOps teams to focus on core application needs.

If you think the “left-shift application security” principle of pulling security earlier into the DevOps process may slow down the speed of development, think again. It shouldn’t be a trade-off to choose between accelerating application development and managing application security threats and fixing failures.  Achieving time-to-market delivery and security goals can be simultaneously achieved if you manage the DevOps process using emerging application development and deployment tools. The window of opportunity here is to streamline processes, using a sophisticated technology stack, and utilizing next-gen technology that low-code offers to nurture AppSec innovation across the development cycle.

Enhance your visual programming and visual modeling techniques with WaveMaker

Data, data, data! It’s everywhere and in large volumes in this data-driven world. What makes data valuable is how it is depicted and interpreted to translate it into information. To make this possible, data visualization using visual programming is used to drive decisions to solve real-world problems. Who would prefer scrolling through spreadsheets over a chart or a map? Probably not many.

With the use of IoT (Internet of things) and connected devices, there is a constant stream of information, leading to a large volume of data (Big Data). From demographic data, consumer behavior information, device usage stats, application downloads to marketing campaign effectiveness, data has become the driving force that powers decision-making in every sphere, across industries. To capitalize on this powerhouse of information is something that every enterprise is working towards.

How do you process such a vast volume of information? How do you interpret yottabytes of data? That’s one septillion bytes! What has made data more digestible is the use of visual programming and visual modeling techniques. By transforming numbers into visual elements such as charts, maps, graphs, and tables, data visualization has become crucial in supporting real-time decision making.

Let’s take real-world problems of the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the importance of numbers has never been more crucial. Solving real-world problems require progressive solutions, one that low-code platforms have risen to offer. Low-code platforms have taken visual programming to the next level. With easy-to-use, drag and drop features, and customizable widgets, low-code platforms make visual modeling a breeze and help to create device-agnostic, critical applications with responsive dashboards.

To describe low-code’s claim to fame in a sentence, consider this – “It took a single developer 1 week to build an entire application!”

Let’s take the Corona Tracker application for example. There are several API sources available with COVID-19 data. Using WaveMaker, you can instantly build a dashboard, plot a map, or create a chart to visualize data from any source. Without any need for coding, visual programming and visual modeling just got easier and by using built-in widgets and dashboards, applications can be built in a few days. Take a look at this time-lapse screenshot of the WaveMaker application created within days…

Decoding Data with Responsive Dashboards

For the user, the dashboard is the first point of visual contact with an application. The sum of the effort and time spent on visual programming is evident in how well a dashboard is designed. How responsive and accessible it is will define the success of the application.

With WaveMaker, not only can you create a powerful dashboard with speed, but you also make sure it is responsive and is accessible on mobile devices and large screens. The Corona Tracker application showcases an extensive dashboard with key metrics such as confirmed cases, recoveries, and deaths reported across several countries. For instance, using the dashboard, you can compare the death rates of the top 10 affected countries against their recovery percentages, and the number of affected people per million in a population, providing valuable information about how the situation is transpiring.

Corona Tracker Application Dashboard

What would it take to build the elements of a dashboard like this? Using WaveMaker, building a dashboard requires minimal visual programming and takes just 4 steps without writing any code. All that you need to do is…

Import from the data source (REST APIs)
Create variables to access the REST API
Drag-n-drop widgets on to the editor or canvas
Bind the widgets to variable.
To find out more about how you can create a responsive dashboard using WaveMaker, read this blog.

Data Visualization Using Charts and Maps

Graphical representation – that’s the whole premise of visual modeling. Depicting data in the form of charts, maps or graphs makes it easier to interpret. In the Corona Tracker application example, besides the dashboard it also features data charts and maps. By integrating data released by John Hopkins University, you can visualize the situation worldwide across a timeline through interactive charts and maps. What low-code has changed is that within a few clicks, you can apply visual modeling methods with minimal coding efforts.

Use Drag-n-Drop Visualization Techniques and Customize Datasets to Build Charts

Typically, in conventional visual modelling methods, creating a customized chart required writing many lines of code. With low-code, charts with custom metrics can be created with just a few clicks. To build plots for visualization in the application, WaveMaker has in-built, nvd3-based charts. You can drag-n-drop the chart widget on to the editor or canvas and bind the dataset property to the Variable to plot the data, as depicted below…

While this how a basic chart is plotted, when it comes to customizing a dataset, low-code plays an important part by using JavaScript visual programming. In this example, from the data of 180+ countries provided in the API, you can choose the top 10 countries and calculate the metrics for the “rest of the world” by writing JavaScript code. Once the API response is fetched, you can calculate custom metrics and create a dataset based on how you want to visualize data.

Use Prefab Tools to Build Maps and Build Reusable Components

A map that graphically depicts data is not easy to create and not all platforms have in-built widgets. With WaveMaker, you can create a Prefab using JavaScript library datamaps. By taking the JSON input for countries and a colormap along with the code, you can plot the visualization you intend to create.

Prefabs or widgets are typically built by JavaScript developers, those who have visual modelling experience, and the knowledge of working with a JavaScript library. In a prefab project, the widget, created as a reusable component, can be published to the workspace by dropping it on to the canvas. By adding test data through the editor, the prefab can also be easily tested separately from the application.

In today’s data-driven world, data visualization is integral. Visual programming tools have been around for decades. Remember 25 years ago, how Visual Basic and Access was used to generate User Interfaces (UIs) from a database, automatically? While conventional visual programming tools made data visualization simpler, more often than not, it involved writing several lines of code, and in time it became considerably more complex and difficult to understand and write code. Taking the same concepts of older visual programming languages, data visualization has evolved with the introduction of low-code platforms.

What low-code brings to the table is the ease at which data visualization can be achieved, with minimal coding and maximum value. With the speed at which applications need to be developed today, developers are under immense pressure to achieve delivery timelines. Irrespective of the industry sector, whether the objective is to visualize data, deliver a personalized customer experience or modernize legacy systems, business-critical applications are being developed at greater speed. Low-code provides professional developers with the much-required agility that they need to develop customized applications at greater speed.

Think about it, the Corona Tracker application was built in a week. There are so many possibilities to build critical business apps that can help enterprises move on to the next level.

Enhance your visual programming and visual modeling techniques using low-code.