Tag: low-code applications

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, ...
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 "Slow" can come from:   Database queries being far from optimal - missing indexes, outdated statistics, bad join strategies etc.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...