500 years ago there existed an entire industry based upon copying books by hand. Typically the process was done by monks, sitting in monasteries, often worshipped as semi-gods may I add. 50 years later the industry was replaced by the printing press in its entirety, and none of these guys could hold their jobs.
A slightly more recent example can be found by looking at the process of manufacturing cars. When Henry Ford created his first car, it took 18 months to assemble a car, and the process typically included dozens of humans, working non-stop on the same car for 18 months. 20 years after Ford created his first factory, he was rolling out a car in 3 weeks.
From eCommerce to the Internet of Things, technology has driven change in almost every aspect of business — prompting owners and managers to remake, rebuild, and reconstruct the way they run their operations (Ismail).
While most companies feel reluctant to make the change (Beede et al), the rising popularity of low-code application development is paving opportunities for enterprises to digitize their operations, automate their workflows, and more (Gartner).
Since 2008, Salesforce has allowed developers worldwide to build and manage a custom CRM for their enterprise. This Refcard provides an overview of how to design applications to run on the Salesforce Platform, exploring the no- to-full code spectrum.
A modal is a common UI element used to grab the user’s attention by overlaying the page. In this step-by-step tutorial, we will show you how to implement, style, and interact with modals in UI Builder.
Also known as overlays or dialog windows, modals are an easy way to ensure your user receives information or takes an action you want them to take. In order to guarantee the user interacts with the modal, most modals prevent the user from interacting with the underlying page.
With "no-code" tools, anyone can build a mobile or web app faster than ever before. In this step-by-step demo of Backendless UI Builder, we walk you through the creation of a fully Codeless To-Do app.
The Backendless UI Builder is one of our favorite features in Version 6. UI Builder is a no-code, drag-and-drop interface for building the frontend of your app. Whether your app is mobile, web, or both, you can design for all platforms.
In the software as a service (SaaS) landscape, there are many variations of "____ as a service." In this article, we will explain what mobile backend as a service, or MBaaS, means.
Mobile backend as a service (MBaaS) is an online service designed to be an all-in-one solution for backend app development. This typically includes data and database management, API management, security, and push notifications.
It was only a handful of years ago that the low-code story was innocently simple. Instead of coding software line-by-line by hand, use a low-code tool that provided visual abstractions that enabled developers to shortcut the hand-coding process by dragging and dropping tasks onto workflows, widgets onto screens, and the like.
Then along came no-code. The contrast between the two approaches was clear. Low-code targeted professional developers, simplifying their work by taking ‘plumbing’ tasks off their plate, while also facilitating collaboration with business stakeholders.
NoCode is a great concept that empowers nonprogrammers to build applications without having to become software developers; however, some people believe that NoCode will eventually replace traditional coding (i.e. that you can build anything on NoCode platforms). If you are starting a project with this mindset, you may end up sorely disappointed.
NoCode is a tool that complements traditional coding within the technology stack of an organization. There are certain types of projects that are ideal for NoCode, while others shouldn’t even be considered.
Gartner predicts that by 2023, over 50% of medium to large enterprises will have adopted a Low-code/No-code application as part of their platform development.
The proliferation of Low-code/No-code tooling can be partially attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has put pressure on businesses around the world to rapidly implement digital solutions. However, adoption of these tools — while indeed accelerated by the pandemic — would have occurred either way.
Even before the pandemic, the largest, richest companies had already formed an oligopsony around the best tech talent and most advanced development tools. Low-Code/No-code, therefore, is an attractive solution for small and mid-sized organizations to level the playing field, and it does so by giving these smaller players the power to do more with their existing resources.
While these benefits are often realized in the short term, the long-term effect of these tools is often shockingly different. The promise of faster and cheaper delivery is the catch — or lure — inside this organizational mousetrap, whereas backlogs, vendor contracts, technical debts, and constant updates are the hammer.
So, what exactly is the No-Code trap, and how can we avoid it?
What is a No-Code Tool?
First, let's make sure we clear up any confusion regarding naming. So far I have referred Low-Code and No-Code as if they were one term. It’s certainly easy to confuse them — even large analyst firms seem to have a hard time differentiating between the two — and in the broader context of this article, both can lead to the same set of development pitfalls.
Under the magnifying glass, however, there are lots of small details and capabilities that differentiate Low-code and No-code solutions. Most of them aren’t apparent at the UI level, leading to much of the confusion between where the two come from.
In this section, I will spend a little bit of time exploring the important differences between those two, but only to show that when it comes to the central premise of this article they are virtually equivalent.
Low-Code vs. No-Code Tools
The goal behind Low-Code is to minimize the amount of coding necessary for complex tasks through a visual interface (such as Drag 'N' Drop) that integrates existing blocks of code into a workflow.
Skilled professionals have the potential to work smarter and faster with Low-Code tools because repetitive coding or duplicating work is streamlined. Through this, they can spend less time on the 80% of work that builds the foundation and focuses more on optimizing the 20% that makes it different. It, therefore, takes on the role of an entry-level employee doing the grunt work for more senior developers/engineers.
No-Code has a very similar look and feel to Low-Code, but is different in one very important dimension. Where Low-Code is meant to optimize the productivity of developers or engineers that already know how to code (even if just a little), No-Code is built for business and product managers that may not know any actual programming languages. It is meant to equip non-technical workers with the tools they need to create applications without formal development training.
No-Code applications need to be self-contained and everything the No-Code vendor thinks the user may need is already built into the tool.
As a result, No-Code applications create a lot of restrictions for the long-term in exchange for quick results in the short-term. This is a great example of a 'deliberate-prudent' scenario in the context of the Technical Debt Quadrant, but more on this later.
Advantages of No-Code Solutions
The appeal of both Low-Code and No-Code is pretty obvious. By removing code organizations can remove those that write it — developers — because they are expensive, in short supply, and fundamentally don’t produce things quickly.
The benefits of these two forms of applications in their best forms can be pretty substantial:
Resources: Human Capital is becoming increasingly scarce — and therefore expensive. This can stop a lot of ambitious projects dead in their tracks. Low-Code and No-Code tools minimize the amount of specialized technical skills needed to get an application of the ground, which means things can get done more quickly and at a lower cost.
Low Risk/High ROI: Security processes, data integrations, and cross-platform support are all built into Low-Code and No-Code tools, meaning less risk and more time to focus on your business goals.
Moving to Production: Similarly, for both types of tools a single click is all it takes to send or deploy a model or application you built to production.
Looking at these advantages, it is no wonder that both Low-Code and No-Code have been taking industries by storm recently. While being distinctly different in terms of users, they serve the same goal — that is to say, faster, safer and cheaper deployment. Given these similarities, both terms will be grouped together under the 'No-Code' term for the rest of this article unless otherwise specified.
List of No-Code Data Tools
So far, we have covered the applications of No-Code in a very general way, but for the rest of this article, I would like to focus on data modeling. No-Code tools are prevalent in software development, but have also, in particular, started to take hold in this space, and some applications even claim to be an alternative to SQL and other querying languages (crazy, right?!). My reasons for focusing on this are two-fold:
Firstly, there is a lot of existing analysis around this problem for software development and very little for data modeling. Secondly, this is also the area in which I have the most expertise.
Now let's take a look at some of the vendors that provide No-Code solutions in this space. These in no way constitute a complete list and are, for the most part, not exclusively built for data modeling.
1. No-Code Data Modeling in Power BI
Power BI was created by Microsoft and aims to provide interactive visualizations and business intelligence capabilities to all types of business users. Their simple interface is meant to allow end-users to create their own reports and dashboards through a number of features, including data mapping, transformation, and visualization through dashboards. Power BI does support some R coding capabilities for visualization, but when it comes to data modeling, it is a true No-Code tool.
2. Alteryx as a Low-Code Alternative
Alteryx is meant to make advanced analytics accessible to any data worker. To achieve this, it offers several data analytics solutions. Alteryx specializes in self-service analytics with an intuitive UI. Their offerings can be used as Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) Tools within their own framework. Alteryx allows data workers to organize their data pipelines through their custom features and SQL code blocks. As such, they are easily identified as a Low-Code solution.
3. Is Tableau a No-Code Data Modeling Solution?
Tableau is a visual analytics platform and a direct competitor to Power BI. They were recently acquired by Salesforce which is now hoping to 'transform the way we use data to solve problems—empowering people and organizations to make the most of their data.' It is also a pretty obvious No-Code platform that is supposed to appeal to all types of end-users. As of now, it offers fewer tools for data modeling than Power BI, but that is likely to change in the future.
4. Looker is a No-Code Alternative to SQL
Looker is a business intelligence software and big data analytics platform that promises to help you explore, analyze, and share real-time business analytics easily. Very much in line with Tableau and Power BI, it aims to make non-technical end-users proficient in a variety of data tasks such as transformation, modeling, and visualization.
You might be wondering why I am including so many BI/Visualization platforms when talking about potential alternatives to SQL. After all, these tools are only set up to address an organization's reporting needs, which constitute only one of the use cases for data queries and SQL. This is certainly a valid point, so allow me to clarify my reasoning a bit more.
While it is true that reporting is only one of many potential uses for SQL, it is nevertheless an extremely important one. There is a good reason why there are so many No-Code BI tools in the market—to address heightening demand from enterprises around the world — and therefore, it is worth taking a closer look at their almost inevitable shortcomings.
COBOL was taught to me as a programming language that can supposedly be used directly by businesses, rather than businesses contacting programmers to write the code. For people who have never tried COBOL, you write programs called “Essays” with “Paragraphs” with a lot of capital letters and with whitespace margins on the left. The software industry always has this fascination with no-code technology. They want businesses to be able to create software that is not lost in the translation. This clearly proves the point that building software is not a technology problem, but rather a communication problem when it comes to actually using the technology.
The closest anyone has gotten to success with a no-code tool is none other than with the infamous Excel sheet. Why is it so successful? — because the data, formula, and outputs were close to each other, and the software required users to overcome only a very small learning curve. Business people who started using it turned it into a personal software that does a lot of things for them but is not useful to put to use even in simple production scales or to customize it for others. I have been given Excel sheets during the requirements phase and asked to transform that into software that can be used and extended as well. So though it worked, it could not scale to be a full-fledged software.
In today’s COVID-savvy, Amazoned world, supply chains depend more than ever upon software – and yet, legacy applications threaten to bog down this essential part of the business. In truth, no company can afford such a ball and chain that limits its ability to remain competitive in today’s turbulent business environment.
As a result, IT leaders find themselves in a quandary: either live with the profit-killing technical debt that legacy applications deliver, or, somehow, cut those applications loose in order to implement all-new supply chain management technology.
In our 2020 state of application development survey, 21 percent of 2,200 IT professionals said they were changing faster than their competition, and 19 percent and 21 percent said they could deliver mobile and web apps, respectively, in 1-2 months or less. How do they do it? According to our Speed of Change report, they use modern application development technology that drives a customer focus and increases their speed. But before you rush off and invest in an application development platform that promises speed, there are some things to consider to ensure you invest wisely.
Ready to Develop an Application at High Speed? Not so Fast
Consider everything involved with hand-coding an app, scaling it, and changing not long after it is released. Describing the development process would increase the length of this post to War and Peace proportions. And my figurative hat goes off to all the designers, developers, and architects who spend as much as 12 months doing this. But what if it’s a virtual care app that has to go live in a month?
I got together with some industry experts and asked them what they thought about no-code and to find out some different perspectives that you may not have considered.
What Is No-Code Anyway?
"I think that we need to define what no-code is. I also think that we need to define what programming is. My definition of programming, in this context, would be the organization of logic and data to accomplish an objective.
When everyone on the team is involved, good things happen.
In a digitally connected world, competitive pressure on organizations to innovate has made cross-functional collaboration between business units and IT developers a strategic requirement.
Not surprisingly, corporate investment in software development is booming. This has led to increased interest by market analysts in assessing the strength of different visual software development platforms.
I always like to hear how a person first learned about the low-code-slash-no-code phenomenon. That’s why trade shows are so much fun; you get to ask these kinds of questions of people walking into your booth. It’s usually one of my first questions--after scanning their badge of course.
In asking this, I also quickly discover that most people don’t know the difference between a low-code platform and a no-code solution, which sparks a lengthy and passionate explanation on my part. Because there are a number of very significant differences between low-code and no-code platforms, if you’re considering moving away from traditional application development, or even just want to try out visual application development, you’ll want to be aware of what you’re getting in each offering.
It’s no secret these days that AI is a big deal in the world of business. According to Gartner, the percentage of enterprises using the technology has jumped astronomically over the past several years, tripling in the last year alone.
