Low-Code vs Traditional Development

It’s easy to think of low-code vs traditional development as an either proposition, but the reality is more complex. Low-code and traditional approaches to programming often overlap within the same workflows. Here’s a primer on what low code means, compared to traditional app development practices, and how to fit it into your broader business development strategy.

Low-code development is an approach in which the developer implements some elements of the application using pre-coded modules, often selected using a drag-and-drop interface, to create the desired functionality.

Mainstream organizations to evolve

More and more organizations are adopting low-code platforms within central IT located in and across business units to drive innovation closer to desired business outcomes. External modules or third-party APIs that integrate functionality into an application are also fundamentally similar to low-code programming.

Advantages

Speed – Programmers can build applications faster using a low-code approach because it eliminates manual programming. A low-code platform vendor, claims that nearly three-quarters of developers who use low-code tools complete projects in less than three months, where a traditional approach can take twice that or more.

Costs – Because small code development is faster, it can reduce the overall cost of the business.

Quality – Low-code applications may not perform as well or be as reliable as well-designed applications built using a traditional approach.

Customization – Low-code platforms offer fewer opportunities to customize the overall application or control how it runs.

Deployment options – Some low-code platforms allow developers to deploy applications only to certain platforms, such as specific clouds.

Advantages

Management – Developers have the most control over how their code is written and how applications are structured.

Flexibility – Traditional development can be done using virtually any programming language and development platform.

Deploy – Applications developed using a traditional approach can be deployed to any location developers choose to support.

Disadvantages

Time – Manual programming is more time-consuming than automatically generated code from low-code tools. It also takes longer to manually tune the code to support multiple platforms and create sockets and other interfaces between applications and services.

Skills traditional – Development may require more specialized knowledge with a particular programming language or development platform.

Integration – Low-code tools can make it easier to integrate the application you build with external tools or platforms.

Simple website – There’s rarely a good reason to write HTML, PHP, and CSS by hand for a simple website that consists mostly of static content.

Business analytics – A low-code approach is often ideal for creating dashboards or reporting tools to support business analytics—in fact, many ERP and Business Process Management platforms offer built-in low-code tools.

Conclusion

The future of low-code development seems very bright as more and more companies integrate it into the application development lifecycle. Nowadays, more and more software development companies are extending the traditional approach to low-code/no-code development.