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This article focuses on "how to understand low code". Interested friends may wish to take a look at it. The method introduced in this paper is simple, fast and practical. Let's let the editor take you to learn how to understand low code.

A preface

If you choose to use a keyword to represent the upcoming 2020, I believe everyone will agree that it is "COVID-19". The epidemic is coming too fast like a tornado, blocking the physical connection between countless people around the world in just a few months. But fortunately, we have entered the Internet era in an all-round way: no matter how thick the N95 mask is, it can't stop the smooth flow of information bits (otaku: bilibili still smells good); no matter how long the home is isolated, it won't hinder the punctual delivery of nail messages (social animals: the work is still hard). Xiaoyaozi said at the Yunqi conference in September: "the new productivity represented by new technology must be the best driving force for us to overcome the epidemic and create the future at full speed." So in the post-epidemic era, what kind of new technology is needed to really liberate IT productivity and accelerate the digital transformation of society, Make The World Great Again? I think it's Low-Code.

Based on the classic visualization and model-driven concepts, combined with the latest cloud native and multi-end experience technologies, low code can greatly improve efficiency and reduce costs in appropriate business scenarios, providing a new high-productivity development paradigm (Paradigm Shift) for professional developers. On the other hand, low code can turn business people who do not understand code into so-called civilian developers (Citizen Developer), making up for the growing gap of professionals and promoting the ultimate agile form (BizDevOps) of deep collaboration between business and technology. This article will focus on the background knowledge related to low code, including the definition and meaning of low code, related concepts, industry development, etc., hoping to help you better understand and understand the emerging field of low code.

Second, what is low code?

What is "Low-Code"? If this is the first time you have heard of it, it will probably be the same as my inner play when I heard the word from my boss: what? "Low-Code"? "Code" means code. I know, but what does the word "Low" mean? It can't be the boss who found that the code I recently rushed to write is ugly and "Low". After thinking too much, how could the boss review the code himself? Does that mean "Low" in "Low-level programming"? The boss finally found that it was too wasteful for me to wait for programming wizards to pile up Java business code all day and sent me to write a high-performance C language network library. Obviously not, the boss can't have such technical feelings. What on earth does that mean? As a programmer who has a higher search quotient than EQ, anyone who can ask Google will never ask his boss. So after a meal of operation, I opened the first search result without thinking. Sure enough, this is a Wikipedia entry full of free fragrance that can only be smelled over the wall: Low-code development platform.

Wikipedia definition

This definition is more inclined to clarify the core values of low code than the Wiki version:

The low-code development platform can realize the rapid delivery of business applications. In other words, not only is it "able" to develop applications like traditional development platforms, but the focus of low-code development platforms is to develop applications "faster". More importantly, the speed is subversive: according to a 2016 survey by Forrester, most companies reported that low-code platforms helped them improve their development efficiency by 5-10 times. And we have reason to believe that this multiple can continue to rise as low-code technologies, products, and industries continue to mature.

Low code development platform can reduce the development cost of business applications. On the one hand, low-code development requires less investment in software lifecycle processes (less code writing, simpler environment setup and deployment costs). On the other hand, low-code development also significantly reduces the threshold for developers, and non-professional developers can quickly take up posts after simple basic IT training, which can not only fully mobilize and make full use of the existing human resources of the enterprise, but also greatly reduce the dependence on expensive professional developer resources.

Low code core competence

Based on the above definition and analysis, it is not difficult to summarize the core competencies of the following three low-code development platforms:

Responsibilities and challenges of the platform

What is mentioned above is the ability and attractiveness that low code provides to developers, so as the provider of services and the carrier of applications, what are the responsibilities and challenges of the low code development platform itself? Is it necessary to "leave complexity to yourself and simplicity to others", as Ali Yun advocated? Although this sentence sounds profound and meaningful, I wonder if you have ever wondered why we have to cling to complexity and find trouble for ourselves for no reason. Can't we just kill the complex and leave some simplicity for our own staff of Aliyun? Is it that work is too easy to show the value of KPI, or is the food at home not as fragrant as the company's midnight snacks?

After thinking about it for a long time, I found the answer from the first law of thermodynamics: the total complexity of developing an application is constant and can only be transferred rather than disappear. If developers want to do less and enjoy simple pleasures, then the platform has to do more and quietly take on as much complexity as possible. Like an acrobatic actor covered with tendons, he steadily lifts the female partner who spins and jumps high; the lighter the person above, the more effortless he looks, and the more steady and exhausted he or she is below. Of course, it's not that the above actresses are easy and stress-free, but they have different division of labor and different complexity.

According to the division of Fred Brooks, the author of Myth of Man and Moon, the complexity of software development can be divided into essential complexity (Essential complexity) and accidental complexity (Accidental complexity). The former is the minimum complexity inherent in solving problems, which has nothing to do with what kind of tools you use, rich experience, good architecture, etc., while the latter is the complexity introduced in the actual development process. In general, essential complexity is strongly related to the specific problem domain that the business is trying to solve, so here I call it "business complexity" that is easier to understand; this part of complexity cannot be solved by any development method or tool, including low code. Accidental complexity is generally strongly related to the technical details of the development phase, so I call it "technical complexity" accordingly, and this part of complexity is exactly what low code is good at and suitable for solving.

For developers to shield the underlying technical details as much as possible, reduce unnecessary technical complexity, and support them to better deal with business complexity (to meet the requirements of flexible and general business scenarios), this is the core responsibility of a low-code development platform.

If deduced according to the above analogy, low code will follow a similar development trajectory with video in the future, surpassing pure code to become the mainstream development mode. Gartner's forecast also expresses the same view: by 2024, 65 per cent of all application development activities will be done in low code, while 75 per cent of large enterprises will use at least four low code development tools for application development.

But similarly, just as video can never replace articles, low code can never completely replace pure code development. In the future, low code and pure code will coexist in a complementary form for a long time, each glowing and glowing in the business scenarios they are suitable for. In the later "low-code business scenarios" section, we will detail which scenarios are more suitable for development in low-code mode at this stage.

Zero code (Zero-Code / No-Code)

From the perspective of the completeness of the classification, it is natural that there is a "pure code" and a completely opposite "zero code" (also known as "no code"). Zero code is an application development platform that does not need to write code at all, but this does not mean that zero code is more advanced and advanced than low code, it just makes a more extreme choice: completely embrace simple graphical visualization and completely eliminate complex text code. The reason behind the choice is that the zero code development platform expects to reduce the barriers to application development as much as possible, so that everyone can become a developer (note: develop ≠ to write code), including business analysts, user operations, and even product managers who don't understand the code at all.

Even for professional developers, under the trend of more and more refined technical division of labor (front-end / back-end / algorithm / SRE/ data analysis..), it is difficult to recruit a full-stack engineer who can independently develop and maintain a complete set of complex applications. But zero code can change all this: whether it's a technical rookie who can't tell the difference between Java and JavaScript, or Daniel, who is proficient in deep learning but doesn't have time to learn the algorithm developed by Web, he can realize his technical dream or full-stack dream through zero code. "there is an idea that has changed the world, and all we need is a programmer." this joke may really come true; Oh no, you don't even need a programmer, people with idea can do it themselves.

Although there are these obvious differences between zero code and low code in a narrow sense, zero code can be regarded as a subset of low code in a broad sense. In its related research report, Gartner put "No Code" in the wider range of low-code application platform "LCAP" (Low-Code Application Platform). At present, many general low-code development platforms on the market also have a certain degree of zero-code capability; for example, Mendix, the leader in the low-code field, not only provides easy-to-use zero-code Web IDE-Mendix Studio, but also includes a more powerful low-code desktop IDE-Mendix Studio Pro.

HpaPaaS (High Productivity Application PaaS)

As mentioned above, the word "Low-Code" is given by Forrester. Gartner, who is also a well-known international research organization (a.k.a word maker), obviously will not easily admit defeat in this new concept competition that may determine the status of the low-code field, so he invented the more elegant acronym "HpaPaaS" (High-productivity application Platform as a Service) in 2017.

According to Gartner's definition, HpaPaaS is a platform that supports declarative, model-driven design and one-click deployment, providing rapid application development (RAD), deployment, and operational features on the cloud; this is clearly the same as the definition of low code. But it turns out that being too professional is not a good thing, and "HpaPaas" eventually lost to the earlier, more approachable and more palatable "Low-Code": starting from 2019, Gartner began to fully adopt the word "Low-Code" (such as LCAP) in its research reports, putting @ deprecated marks on "HpaPaaS".

Gartner predicts that the market growth of application development demand will exceed at least five times the enterprise's IT delivery capacity by 2021. In the face of such a huge IT gap, without a revolutionary "new productivity" system, it is difficult to imagine that the problem can be completely solved by the development of the existing traditional technology system alone. Low-code technology comes with this mission, hoping to completely revolutionize application development productivity and save the nearly troubled world of IT through the following aspects:

Improving efficiency and reducing cost & quality Assurance

Although the software industry has been developing rapidly and new languages, frameworks and tools emerge in endlessly, as practitioners we have to admit that software development is still in the manual workshop stage, with low efficiency, high labor cost and uncontrollable quality. Delayed delivery of projects has become the norm in the industry, and bottlenecks are almost always developers (not a problem for problems that machines can solve); good developers are always scarce resources and expensive; software quality defects can not be converged all the time. Online failures occur frequently.

In contrast, after hundreds of years of development of the industrial revolution, most of the traditional manufacturing industry has already got rid of its strong dependence on "people": from raw material input to product output, with the stable support of all kinds of precision instruments and automation assembly lines in the middle. really realize the standardization and scale of production. Although informatization claims to be the third industrial revolution of mankind, the current situation of the software industry is far from reaching a mature stage of "industrialization".

So, dear programmer friends, when you have been interfacing with the front end all morning, pressing the demand with the product all afternoon, fighting with your own bug all night, and finally falling asleep and being woken up by a series of alarm text messages, have you ever looked up at the starry sky: "I have a dream... that one day, software development can also be mass-produced like industrial products, stable and efficient without worry." By now, whether you realize it or not, this vision is slowly becoming a reality.

At this point, application development capability is no longer the patent and privilege of a few professional developers, and the skill threshold and cost of ownership required in the future will become lower and lower, truly realizing the so-called "technology democratization" (democratization of technology).

Strengthen the communication and cooperation of the development process

Multi-survey results show that one of the main reasons for the failure of software projects is the lack of communication (poor communication). Under the traditional development mode, business, product, design, development, testing and operation and maintenance personnel perform their own duties, and each has its own set of tools and languages in the field, which has been easy to form a "silos" for a long time, making cross-functional communication difficult and inefficient. This is why both the popular agile development and DevOps emphasize communication (the former is collaborative Biz and Dev, while the latter is collaborative Dev and Ops), while the classic DDD domain-driven design also advocates a "unified language" to reduce communication inconsistencies between business and technical personnel.

In this day and age, the "old" technologies that support low code have been brewing and market testing for too long, while other perfectly complementary "new" technologies (e.g. Cloud native, responsive Web) is also rapidly developing and maturing, and it is time to repackage and launch the new wine bottle with "low code", bringing a truly fragrant journey to the traditional IT market, which is in urgent need of new productivity.

The business income is not obvious.

Even if the low-code technology of more than a decade ago is mature enough, it will not have the same influence in the application development market at that time. Why? Because technologies are all for business services, and the business requirements of application development at that time are much simpler than they are now: without today's Multi-channel, Multi-experience and various integration and customization requirements, nor do they expect the flexibility, distribution and high availability that have become standard for enterprise applications today, and there is no rapidly changing IT business scenario to promote continuous integration and rapid delivery.

Although low code can perfectly solve all the above problems (e.g. Multi-end application generation, cloud native architecture, API integration capability), but in the current market and business background, coupled with the technology immaturity mentioned above, the overall input-output ratio will be very low, which is not enough for enterprises to adopt low-code solutions on a large scale.

To sum up, there are two points:

The market for low code is large enough and has been growing at a high speed.

As an economic power and IT power in the Asia-Pacific region, China's low-code market will lead to an explosion and the growth rate will exceed the global average in the next few years.

Applicable scenario

In theory, low code is a general development model that completely targets traditional pure code and should be able to support all possible business scenarios. But the theory is only a theory, and the dream of unifying the world with low code has not been reflected into reality, and it is impossible to completely replace reality. As mentioned earlier, low code and pure code are complementary and will co-exist for a long time in the future, each glowing in the business scenarios they are suitable for. At the same time, it should also be pointed out that the current stage of low-code technology, products and markets are not yet fully mature, so some of the scenarios that might have been suitable for low-code development can only be replaced by pure code.

In his 2019 low-code survey, Gartner drew an "application pyramid" to illustrate low-code scenarios:

The above pictures show the magic quadrant of the low-code platform given by Gartner and the technical spectrum of the low-code platform given by Forrester. You can see from the figure:

OutSystems and Mendix take the lead and are recognized as leaders in the field of low code. These two companies are pure general-purpose low-code development platforms, and both have developed and accumulated over a long time: OutSystems was founded in 2001 with 1,000 employees and annual revenue of more than $100m; it received $360 million in financing from KKR and Goldman Sachs in June 2018 and is currently valued at more than $1 billion Mendix was founded in 2005 with 500 employees and annual revenue of more than $23 million (18 years' data). It was acquired by Siemens for $730 million in August 2018.

Salesforce and Microsoft are not far behind and are among the industry leaders. But the nature and path of the two companies are very different: Salesforce started with SaaS, so the size of the company is needless to say, it is the giant of the SaaS class anyway. The motivation of this kind of SaaS manufacturers to do low code is to solve customers' demand for customization of finished SaaS software. M$ needless to say, just talk about their natural advantages of doing low code: on the one hand, as an office software aircraft carrier, low code can help their customers upgrade their capabilities and experiences from Excel forms to customized App; on the other hand, as one of the big three in cloud computing, low code can help them connect to the internal cloud computing ecosystem and provide developers with a unified and easy-to-use cloud interface.

The foreign market has been fully verified, but the domestic market is just emerging, and no one has been able to win the hearts of the above-mentioned research institutions and squeeze into the above two diagrams. Some of the current domestic competitions and financing include: in May 2018, Jianyun completed round A financing; in September 2018, Yi Chuang Technology received strategic financing from Qingyuan Venture Capital; in December 2018, Liuliu completed 10 million-level Pre-A financing; in August 2019, Digital Technology received tens of millions of RMB angel round financing from PCCW Capital; and in August 2019, ClickPaas received millions of dollars in round A financing from Morningside Capital. In 2019, Aozhe received 50 million A + financing from Ali and hundreds of millions of yuan from Banyan Capital. (note: the competition data comes from the painstaking arrangement of our group PD, so I decided that the rest of this article will not hack PD any more; we'll talk about it in the next article. )

At this point, I believe you have a deeper understanding of "how to understand low code". You might as well do it in practice. Here is the website, more related content can enter the relevant channels to inquire, follow us, continue to learn!

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