Tag: low-code applications

How to create a system for mail merge in 5 simple steps

The need to generate and send personalized documents or otherwise, mail merge is still very common in many companies. It is used in communication with clients or partners. Formerly, printed and sent by post, now the same documents are sent to customers by e-mail. There are many business cases here: invoices, settlements, various types of letters and contracts.   Companies deal with this challenge in two different ways:   In large organizations, IT team implements specialized modules which, after integration with other systems, generate documents on demand. Unfortunately, these modules are often very "technical": integration requires programming work and document templates must be prepared, for example, in the form of XSLT transforms (sic!). More often, however, companies use simple mechanisms such as mail merge available in MS Office or simply fill out documents by hand. Still, the lack of automation makes this process tedious and prone to human error.   Is there a ...

What is the role of low-code in an organization

There are some producers of low code platforms promising that with their tool you can build almost everything in nearly every situation. That’s an overpromise. And it’s toxic. I spoke to many CIO’s who had believed in such a message and were disappointed by reality they experienced afterwards.   My experience is that low code is not going to flood the entire IT market. It has its own role, hand in hand with bespoke software and out-of-the-box products.   Large organizations   Formerly, there was a golden rule for the IT landscape of large organizations to implement fully tailored solutions to support core business and to rely on out-of-the-box products in all areas of support. In effect, an organization could fully invest in custom development within the area that would differentiate it from the competition and bring the greatest added value. At the same time the company benefited from more affordable prices and business knowledge embedded in out-of-the-box products.     Sounds perfect, ...

Low-code solution for complex, high-performance systems? Sounds impossible. Or is it?

There is a stereotype that low-code platforms create software that is slow and limited in functionality. As with any stereotype, there is some truth to that, but not much.   To find out what the reality is, at first, we need to start with how high-performance systems are built using general-purpose programming languages. Let’s get to the bottom of this and then confront it with what low-code has to offer. Is custom programming really such a great advantage compared to low-code solutions? Or is it a drawback?   What makes software “slow”?   What does "slow" really mean in terms of a typical enterprise application? By "typical" I mean a 3-layer classic: Web UI + service backend + databases. "Slow" can come from:   Database queries being far from optimal - missing indexes, outdated statistics, bad join strategies etc. Unnecessary queries - missing caches or “chatty” algorithms assuming that fetching more data from database or external services is free and i...