Enterprises often struggle to strike the right balance for the investment required for various efforts in delivering applications. As businesses become more competitive, largely global, and heavily end user-focused, it pushes the boundary of application requirements in order for the apps to be successful. These requirements are usability, scalability, and faster release cycles.
The landscape of application development and delivery has changed a lot in the past few years. Today’s modern applications need to look great, have a robust architecture so it can scale to millions of users, and should be quickly delivered to customers in order to outsmart the competition.
The ability to deal with these three requirements has been a constant struggle for any enterprise. In any complex application project, one way or another, we face the immutable law of finite resources: We’re bound by constraints. Good, fast, or cheap, we’re told. Pick any two.
This is the classic triple constraint model that you often have to deal with as project leaders. A similar model applies to enterprise application delivery:
Rich UX, Rapid Development, or Robust Architecture: pick any two.
As you can see, while all these 3 things are very important for modern applications, they often work against each other. A project that focuses only on user experience and faster time to market may not have the best robust architecture, while another one that focuses on robust architecture and great user experience may need a longer duration to complete. Something has to give, right?
It used to be that businesses depending on the nature of the application could get away by just focusing on two of the above aspects,
- Small and Medium Enterprise: Focus was on Rapid Development and Rich UX
- Non-Consumer Business Applications: Focus was on Robust Architecture, Rapid Development
- Businesses that focus on Robust Architecture and Rich UX always suffered from long-lasting development cycles
Should enterprise application delivery always be an exercise in sacrifice. given the demands on IT in today's businesses, it has become hard to sacrifice any one of the above. So the question is how do I get to choose all.
Wait.. Hold On, can we get a magical wand that can help us have all the three dimensions of App Delivery. Look no further, modern rapid application development platforms or also referred to as low-code platforms are designed to solve this conundrum.
Take a look at WaveMaker, which specifically addresses the enterprise needs to develop scalable applications, with great user experience out of the box in shorter time frames. Excited, try out a free trial and see how you can now cut short development time and still keep intact your enterprise and end-user requirements.
It’s that time of the year!! Predictions for Low-Code Development using RAD Platforms.
First of all wishing everyone a great new year and all the success for your products, services, customers, and partners! It is that time of the year, where many in the technology industry spend time penning down predictions on the future of technology and everything revolving around it. In the past few days, I have read various predictions on technology, tech marketing, sales enablement, tech disruptions, Cyber Security, and the list goes on and on…
I thought to contribute one more prediction to the many, out there.
This blog is my personal take on what 2017 will look for the RAD (Rapid Application Development) and more specifically trends within Applications developed using such an approach. This is based on my experiences working with customers, partners, speaking to folks in this industry, and general analysis of the market trends.
Adoption
- More Enterprises will continue to invest heavily in searching, exploring, and concept proofing RAD for their own development needs.
- RAD will move from experimental discussion to a serious topic of discussion and consideration among architects, development leaders, and application influencers within enterprises as a way to increase productivity to develop Applications.
- While RAD and low-code development platforms came to being to democratize app development and continue to do so, we will see more professional application developers join the bandwagon of using RAD platforms as a way to develop sophisticated enterprise applications.
Scope of RAD Platforms
- RAD vendors will evolve from only development to full-fledged development, deployment, and application hosting platforms
- As professional developers get deeply involved with RAD, they will want to bring in best practices in app development, deployment, and DevOps from their vast experiences into the application lifecycle. They will push the borders of RAD to increase its scope to include features around DevOps integration, code Branching, automated testing, cloud deployment, real-time integration, etc.
- IoT platform integration will emerge as a key use for applications.
Ease of Development
RAD platforms will be expected to provide drag and drop out-of-box packaged integrations to commonly used services (Payment Gateways, SaaS Platforms, Identity Services, Cloud Services, etc). As part of this, API-based integration will become a de facto way to develop applications and integrate with internal as well as external systems.
Ecosystem Play
For enterprises to fully utilize the power of RAD platforms, they will start to coexist RAD with other complementary platforms in the overall App Ecosystem.
- RAD and API Management Platforms complement each other. These two platforms can feed off each other. RAD can help solve the last mile problem of easy app development for API management platforms. RAD can help create the APIs for App management platforms.
- With IoT gaining traction, RAD and IoT platforms will gain more traction in this year.
- SaaS Platforms will use RAD as an effective way to increase developer adoption and ecosystem creation.
Hope this prediction list has been interesting. Let's see how 2017 pans out for RAD / Low Code Platforms. While I am not a fortune-teller and do not intend to be one, and guarantee the above predictions, there is one thing I can guarantee, that the ride will be exciting for RAD platform vendors as well as enterprises that adopt it. So stay tuned and let's see how this unfolds itself.
Why is it that 75% of the business and IT executives anticipate their software projects will fail? Why is failure rate often a planned expense that is written off long before development ever begins? Here's a fun infographic to not only understand the major friction points in delivering successful enterprise applications but also learn how to tackle these monsters and speed up custom app creation.
Do tell us about the monsters that scare you the most and any other ghouls we may have missed. Happy Halloween!
