Low-code platforms and languages: the future of software development

Abstract

Low-code as a term in software development was mentioned by Forrester in 2014 [1] to denote development platforms, that make application development more accessible to broader community of developers by simplifying the application development process. To simplify development, low code platforms apply several different principles, that have even much older roots, such as visual programming, model driven development with different types of diagrams, process and workflow modelling and management. As a result low-code platforms offer some kind of application builders or creators that allows to drag and drop diagrams and forms to develop the final application, which is then running within a platform engine, often as a service in cloud. The aim of the low code development platforms is on one hand to solve the problem with shortage of human resources in IT by making application development more accessible and on other hand to make application development faster. The hope of both low-code development platforms producers and enterprises as their consumers is to make digital transformation and automation much more accessible and effective. According to Gartner [2], the share of new applications developed by organizations using low-code platforms should reach 70% of all new applications developed by organizations in 2025, compared to less than 25% in 2020. If the Gartner prediction will come true, then low-code will be the future of software development. One of the biggest drawbacks of low code development platforms is that they either hide the (parts of) code from developers of generate the code in lower level languages, that are not accessible for low-code developers. To remove the drawback, one need to define a low-code programming language that will be used to store the source code of the final application generated by the application builder of the platform. Then the platform application engine should serve as an interpreter (as a virtual machine) of the low-code programming language. Although most of today low-code platforms do not work with a low-code language, there are some pioneers. For example, in 2021 Microsoft released an open-source low-code language, called PowerFx [3], for its low-code development platform Power Apps, originally released during 2016, Zoho low-code platform uses their own proprietary language called Deluge [4], Netgrif low-code platform uses open-source low-code language Petriflow [5]. In this paper, we discuss the paradigms that low-code programming languages should implement, such as abstraction from tiers in multi-tier architecture. We also discuss our experience how to teach low-code principles.