WaveMaker Studio is making waves with the new React Native code generation engine. Now web devs can create beautiful cross-platform mobile apps fast, using the skills they already have in their toolbelt, and our intuitive drag-and-drop visual builder. Developers can now produce native-style apps for iOS and Android without the overheads of learning Swift, Kotlin, or a new mobile framework.

With WaveMaker Studio for React Native, anyone with a background in web-based JavaScript can get started with developing mobile native-style apps, fast!

Why React Native?

“React Native is used by over 20 thousand apps on the Google Play Store and 14% of the top apps” - AppBrain

React Native might be developed by Meta, but the software framework is free and open source, so anyone can adapt and use the framework in their apps - for iOS, Android, Meta Quest, and Desktop. React Native is an evolutionary product, developed by Meta engineers plus contributors from outside the business, for maximum usability. You’ll find React Native in some of the world’s most-used apps, from Microsoft Teams to Amazon Shopping, Shopify, Bloomberg, Coinbase, Discord, and more.

Open source is in our DNA at WaveMaker. We choose to work with open-source projects with a thriving, pervasive presence, for ultimate developer choice and opportunities - plus no extra hidden costs of ownership.

How does it work?

The WaveMaker low-code drag-and-drop UI builder

“For 64% of EMA companies, low-code is critical to success in order to make development processes more efficient and reliable.” - Shaping digital transformation with low-code platforms 2023, KPMG

The WaveMaker platform is a low-code, drag-and-drop UI builder, with visual data connectors and logic flows, and the ability to add custom code. The platform is designed to significantly reduce the time taken for developers to get apps to the production phase. By offering drag-and-drop visual components, templates, and more, building the basis of an app is on-sight, fast, and reconfigurable.

The Visual Builder
The WaveMaker Visual Builder contains drag-and-drop: branding, loading, navigation options, quick actions, featured content, buttons, text, lists, grids, pop-ups, app badge icons, user account fields, app settings, images and video, gestures, animations, status bars, and much more.
Prefabs, WaveMaker’s reusable, modular components encapsulate UI elements, logic, and functionality, for building apps super fast.

The Backend
Data models and backend services are managed by WaveMaker's visual database management tools and API integrations. App logic and use cases are created with JavaScript services, custom JS code, or WaveMaker’s built-in event-handling system.

Mobile Helper Systems
Every page in a WaveMaker app has a singleton instance, so developers can manage dynamic content loading, customize behavior, and optimize user interactions, such as swipe gestures or mobile-specific transitions. Here, devs can also handle mobile-specific events such as app lifecycle states.

Cloud-based, real-time collaboration with VCS

The WaveMaker platform with React Native is a cloud-based self-service platform with no environmental setup needed. The platform allows real-time collaboration with inbuilt conflict resolution, backed by versionability with version control systems like Git. This makes it possible for multiple developers to work on a project at once, without the headache of clashing code changes.

Customize with JavaScript

With WaveMaker, you can use the JavaScript ecosystem for component configuration and customization within the visual builder. By customizing with JavaScript, you eliminate the need to use unfamiliar mobile languages, libraries, and frameworks.

Integrate with ease

Already working with an existing codebase? No problem. WaveMaker code can easily be connected to legacy systems and other platforms; utilize APIs to integrate components from anywhere. Found some React Native components you’d love to add to your app? WaveMaker makes it simple to integrate any React Native components with a custom built-in widget.

Build once, deploy on both iOS and Android

“Cross-platform development significantly reduces development time and costs by allowing the organization to deploy a single codebase across multiple platforms.” - Market Guide for Mobile Development Frameworks, Gartner 2024

Thanks to WaveMaker’s React Native code generation, you can now build once in the platform, then package and deploy on both iOS and Android simultaneously - without any platform-specific changes. Of course, if you want to access device-specific features, there is the option to create custom modules to do so.

Test with WaveMaker and React Native tools

WaveMaker includes integrated testing tools, plus leverages React Native DevTools for iOS and Android debugging including live and hot reloads, performance monitoring, log inspection, and more. Flipper can also be integrated for debugging custom React Native components. Generated apps can be swiftly tested on-device by generating a QR code for evaluation.

Deploy with ease

While app store requirements vary, you can expect to optimize your app for performance, generate certificates and keys, ensure all compliance objectives are met, and gather all metadata. Once ready, AppChef or the WaveMaker CLI can package the app into .ipa and .apk files, ready for upload to App Store Connect or the Google Play Console.

WaveMaker Studio for React Native = Rapid App Building

WaveMaker Studio for React Native rapidly speeds up the time to develop apps, reduces the barriers of entry to app building, and is completely DevOps-able and cost-effective, making cross-platform development accessible to all. Whether you want to build a beautiful prototype in a day or create a fully functional native app, WaveMaker Studio for React Native can help you achieve your goals.

If you’d like to see WaveMaker Studio for React Native in action - and how it can help you rapidly build iOS and Android apps - please get in touch for a free demo.

Founding and Early Years

Its been 10 years since WaveMaker was founded as a company. Like the rest of the founding team, I was part of the parent company, Pramati, that acquired the product from VMWare, and already had a reputation in platform technology – having won the global software industry race to the world's first J2EE certified App Server. By 2013, all of us in engineering had our share of experiences in building, selling and supporting world-class software platforms to global customers.

Also, a few years before Pramati’s original middleware server had morphed into an AWS infrastructure automation platform for another Pramati product called Qontext, a SaaS collaboration platform that was acquired by AutoDesk in 2012. Called CloudJEE, it was built to provide services for provisioning, configuration, observability and scaling to manage a large footprint of microservices for any SaaS Product.

After the Qontext exit, Pramati co-founder Vijay Pullur saw an opportunity to evaluate WaveMaker, then an open source Spring-based development platform being divested from VMWare, as part of their split of enterprise-software portfolio into Pivotal back in 2013.

Pramati acquired WaveMaker to combine CloudJEE capabilities with the development platform from WaveMaker, which had a community of 5,000+ developers world-wide. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) was the buzzword then and a lot of enterprise software product companies were working on this idea, such as CloudFoundry, IBM BlueMix and RackSpace. WaveMaker developers were deploying to CloudFoundry. CloudJEE’s merger with WaveMaker gave us an edge to dive into this space and we transitioned them seamlessly to CloudJEE post acquisition.

Pramati founder Jay Pullur’s keen interest in UI/UX development and his desire to simplify UI development by providing Photoshop-like WYSIWYG tools for UI developers, set us on a path to re-build WaveMaker Studio.

When we got the product and its code, it was already aging fast in the light of new developments in JavaScript frameworks and HTML5, and Web in general. Recasting a product stack is always messy and full of surprises – especially when it has been acquired. But bravely, we began by ripping off the Dojo JS library and re-writing the studio in Angular JS. Sharad Singh Solanki – who had joined us a decade back as a furniture-designer turned UX-designer turned web-developer – headed this initiative building the initial UI team of JavaScript experts for WaveMaker.

Thus began a new road with challenges ahead to roll out this new recast studio, promising a radically new and accelerated development workspace entirely on cloud for a large community of developers. This was before anything called low code.

Growth and Milestones

The idea was to enable developers to sign-up or log into a SaaS development environment, without the hassles of downloading and setting up software on their Desktops or laptops. But the problem ahead was to provision a developer workspace within seconds, but at that time to launch a cloud or AWS instance it would take a few minutes even for the tiny or micro instance.

My engineering honcho and journeyman, Venugopal Jidagam, and I always had an inclination to explore new architecture and geek out on infrastructure. Light weight containers (LXC) were the thing of the day then. Docker was just kicking off. After evaluating Apache Mesos, Venu chose Docker to create a container orchestration platform. Soon enough, we were provisioning developer workspaces using containers in seconds, the first and fastest of its kind. Of course, being traditionally shy, we did not tom-tom this.

And then in September 2014, we launched WaveMakerOnline (WMO) bringing to your browser a full-feature WYSIWYG, open standards, modern app development cloud studio.

The Low Code Moniker

So, how did we end up being a low code platform? The category “low code” was created by John Rymer, a Forrester Analyst some time around 2014, to bucket a wide range of products that offered application building tools to non-specialist developers, so called “citizen developers”, with moderate software engineering skills. In 2015, we started to see several app development platforms re-position as low code platforms to gain analyst and enterprise attention. By early 2016, WaveMaker was surveyed and mentioned in the low code vendor landscape report for the first time by John Rymer.  Since then, WaveMaker has been associated with low code application development, offering developers significant productivity gains for end-to-end custom application delivery.

WaveMaker’s initial trajectory is a culmination of ideas from the founding members and we were all focused on building a modern development platform, to simplify enterprise app development. Chandrashekar, then heading creative and marketing functions, guided the design and branding efforts to set WaveMaker apart from the rest, giving it a unique brand identity as a design-led development platform, targeting developers who were happy to code complex applications but without the grunt work that comes with it.

Leadership and Culture

WaveMaker inherited its work culture from the group company Pramati, where each individual has a lot more ownership and cognitive responsibility in how they contribute to the growth of the product. While the overall strategic direction for the product is given by market and business imperatives, engineering strikes the right balance between embracing newer approaches and product stability. Product leaders and key developers are constantly scanning the technology landscape for new advancements and business impacts.

Attention to detail, engineering excellence in terms of performance, quality of software and focus on design are highly regarded and they become the yardstick for measuring success. Our steadfast adherence to these simple principles for more than a decade clearly reflects in the teams that we have assembled and the way they have shaped the product’s success.

While there are no shortcuts to building a world-class product, experimentation is key to innovation, even if they are orthogonal to the business direction. Eventually, when they converge, the impact on customer value is significant. Prashant Reddy, who was part of Qontext and joined AutoDesk as part of the acquisition, returned in 2018 to lead UI engineering efforts. He brought the right ingredients to create a culture of product innovation in WaveMaker.

Industry and Market

WaveMaker’s journey started at the beginning of an era with emerging Cloud adoption, fueling the proliferation of SaaS platforms, mobile apps and social collaboration. We have witnessed the phasing out of the PaaS and BPM markets with the resurgence of low code. Also saw the beginning of container deployments using Kubernetes.
At WaveMaker, we doubled down on enabling developers and software development teams in large organizations to embrace accelerated development, combined with a fully open-source strategy. As against the norm with low code platforms generally appealing to business users and leaning towards building internal departmental apps or business productivity apps, we tackled a harder challenge of enabling customer facing, experience app building with pixel-perfect UI needs.

WaveMaker’s unique approach of code-behind for Low-code app development set us apart from the competition, appealing to the development teams. The choice of technology stack and how the app code is generated, played a significant role for developer adoption. So, this also brought in a tedious task for us as a platform to keep up with the technology stack updates and make sure we beat the software upgrade cycles, so that our platform developers don’t need to go through this pain.

Achievements and Learnings

After the launch of WMO, we started to see mostly small businesses, startups and individual developers signing up to the platform, but the capabilities that we have built into the product are supposed to solve development challenges at large organizations. We rolled out WME (Enterprise Edition) in 2016 as we started to engage with in-house development or IT teams from large enterprises with a developer-based licensing model.

Some of these teams have skills shortage, but they have the steep hill task of building partner facing or customer facing apps, with stringent security and compliance requirements depending on the industry they are operating in. We have successfully onboarded some of these early customers on our Enterprise Edition and we were really excited to see these developers embracing the platform.

However, adoption of WaveMaker from a larger team of developers in an organization was still not on the cards, but we know for sure we’ll hit that mark very soon. Then in 2018, we signed a deal with a large financial services company in the US, in the analytics and credit scoring space. WaveMaker is adopted by their large professional services team to build and deliver fully custom apps integrated with their products.

While most organizations presume low-code platforms to enable citizen developers or those who don’t have technical expertise, some platforms started to position themselves as low code for professional developers. Analysts started to create a separate segment to accommodate low code for developers, while these platforms actually didn’t offer capabilities that appealed to software development teams. This posed difficulty to position ourselves in the market and to maximize the unique advantage we have as a development accelerator that really appealed to developers.

Vision for the Future

The big realization, we are not a low code platform! We are an accelerated development platform or AppGen platform for the future. Thanks to Gen AI and LLM’s ability to understand programming languages, frameworks and spit out real code. LLMs have been trained on open source frameworks and projects, that means we now have a huge advantage to leverage LLM’s ability as a code generator to amplify our acceleration strategy. WaveMaker had been a code generation platform all through emitting Angular and React Native code for building web and mobile apps.

While LLMs can be a co-pilot for assisting development, the code has to be brought in at developer’s discretion and developers need to really author the code for any real use. That may not sound much like acceleration nor skill reduction, but a platform strategy combined with approaches like design to code or prompt to code could really bring true acceleration.

UI development is very complex and UX plays a significant role in the growth and relevance of organisations. At WaveMaker we've seen the evolution of UI development trends, simplified web and mobile app delivery with component based reuse, providing a scalable development methodology for building and rolling out apps. By embracing Design Systems and combining AI-led approaches like design to code and UI co-pilot, we are embarking into the future of app development.

On a Personal Note

I'm very humbled with the journey so far and had an opportunity to really challenge my thinking and ability to bring novel approaches into our products. As a team we’ve always been at the early adoption curve for technology, that really puts us ahead of the rest. Also, the multitude of customer opportunities with a wide variety of application use cases over the last decade really challenged our ability to scale and adapt as a world-class product.

I'm grateful to the amazing team who have been through this journey with me and their perseverance in keeping spirits high through the thick and thin of product adoption and growth. What's remarkable is our team’s ability to spot talent and create developers with a deep understanding of technology and a purpose to solve problems and differentiate.

Selecting a low-code product requires a clear understanding of your most common requirements. Are you dealing with a variety of data and workflows? Do your apps need to integrate with partner APIs? Are your business requirements changing often? Are your users finicky about the experience? Do you have both citizen and professional app development teams? Are you finding it difficult to hire skills?

All low-code platforms give you a promising start. You get off the block at speed, simple apps are easy, and tough ones seem possible. But missing key requirements in your platform means you will soon find yourself skipping deadlines or you need to hire developers to finish the job - defeating the purpose of buying a low-code product. That's why setting some criteria for choosing a low-code application platform is important. Here is our list.

What are your goals for using the low-code platform?

Using a low-code platform offers several benefits.
Here are some common goals of using a low-code platform:

Accelerated Development, Increased productivity, Faster time to market

Low-code platforms enable faster application development by providing pre-built widgets, custom reusable components and visual development interfaces like out-of-the-box themes, templates and layouts. Developers can rely on drag-and-drop methodology, automatic code generation that provides open-standards-based code that is human readable, and auto-API documentation which is all handled by the low code platform. This allows developers to focus on the core functionality of the application without spending excessive time on repetitive coding tasks and reducing the manual coding effort drastically. Consequently, development cycles are shortened, and applications can be delivered to the market quickly.

Cost Savings, Reduced TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of Applications

Low-code platforms can reduce development costs by minimizing the need for seeking/hiring proprietary developer skill sets, extensive coding, reducing the development cycle, and streamlining maintenance and updates. With faster development times and increased productivity, organizations can achieve cost savings in terms of development resources, resource allocation and time to market. Low-code platforms priced based on developer seats are hassle-free when it comes to developing applications, as there is no limit to the number of applications or end users. In addition, it is vital that these platforms do not have any runtime dependency or hidden costs that can later impact the TCO of applications.

Simplified Integration & Deployments

Low-code platforms offer seamless integration capabilities with third-party systems, databases, and APIs. This simplifies the process of connecting and interacting with external services, eliminating the need for extensive custom coding. As a result, integrating disparate systems becomes straightforward, enabling enterprises to leverage existing enterprise assets and data sources effectively with minimal to no disruption in existing practices. The LCDP should also provide the ability to deploy anywhere without any runtime implications. This will enable enterprises the freedom of deploying their apps built using LCDP to either merge with their existing CI/CD process or deploy to an orchestration layer like K8s or Redhat OpenShift or a cloud of their choice or an on-premise setup.

Agility and Flexibility

Low-code platforms provide the ability to make rapid changes, prototyping and updates to applications. With visual development interfaces that include the WYSIWYG approach, developers can easily modify and adapt applications in response to changing business requirements or user feedback. This agility allows organizations to iterate quickly, experiment with new ideas, and respond accurately to market demands.

Collaboration and Transparency

Low-code platforms come with built-in collaboration features, allowing multiple developers to work together on a project. By providing centralized governance and enterprise-grade features like role-based access control at a development level which enhances project management for a development team. These platforms facilitate communication, version control, knowledge and application asset sharing among team members by providing an internal artifact repository that resembles an internal developer marketplace. This promotes transparency, enhances teamwork, and improves the overall developer community.

Who are the users? What’s their coding expertise?

There are primarily two user personas when it comes to low-code platforms - developers and business users. There are low code development tools that are developer-focused and built using open standards frameworks like Java, Angular, HTML, CSS and Javascript that are tailored to developers to boost their productivity and make them efficient while minimizing the learning curve.

• The developer-centric LCDPs are designed to deliver enterprise-grade applications and are used to solve real-world enterprise product gaps and deliver customised user journeys that provide heavy customisations creating value for enterprises and their end users.
• The developer-centric LCDP acts like a force multiplier over existing skill sets of development professionals, transforming them into full-stack developers, so teams can manage the entire application life cycle end-end.
• It is hard to find a LCDP that is completely tech stack agnostic to the type of preferred developer. That being said, for a developer-centric LCDP which is either Java-based/.Net based, it would be easy to find the relevant talent pool in the market and relatively easy to adopt and adapt to.

On the other hand, there are LCDPs that are business user-oriented, which deliver a workflow-based approach to application development that may or may not fall under the category of solving serious enterprise-grade applications, like basic approval flows, data collection etc., they do provide value in creating simple user journeys and flow-based applications. But here, the application delivery cycle times can be delayed due to a handoff between the business user and the development/delivery teams.

What is the scope and scale of the problem to be solved?

There are multiple use cases that can be an ideal fit for low-code platforms:

• Creating new user experiences: LCDP can provide pixel-perfect UI and screens that enable enterprises to develop end user-facing web responsive & mobile applications as per their customer convenience. Enterprises also need to keep in mind that to maintain customer satisfaction, their offerings need to change as per market demands and conditions to provide the best value to their customers. Having the ability, agility and flexibility to match or exceed these expectations with minimal effort and maximum productivity is something to look out for in a LCDP.
• Legacy System Modernization: Enterprises still rely on legacy systems that are outdated or difficult to maintain which leads to increased TCO. Low code platforms can help modernize these systems by allowing developers to build new interfaces, integrate with modern technologies, or even replace specific functionalities with modern application artifacts. It is essential to choose a LCDP that provides a tech stack and a scalable tech stack upgrade plan to maintain and keep your applications relevant and futureproof.
• Self-Service Portals: Low code platforms can be utilized to create self-service portals, empowering end-users to access and manage their own data, request services, and perform tasks independently. These portals can enhance customer stickiness, reduce support overhead, and improve overall user experience. The LCDP should have an underlying framework that is open and flexible to easily integrate into the existing enterprise assets/core systems with minimal disruption and can provide a modern interface necessary to absorb new requirements faster.

Are there custom integrations with external and internal applications?

The LCDP of choice should have the necessary open framework to support integration for systems already in use within your enterprise to meet your application requirements. Integrations to Swagger API open spec or standards provide LCDPs with a higher acceptance of universally used APIs facilitating integrations with any third-party systems - external or internal.

It is an added benefit when the LCDP is advanced enough to understand the API input and provide the necessary CRUD endpoints automatically based on the API definitions. This heavy lifting of the LCDP will improve developer productivity and reduce the coding effort. In some cases where the already in-use APIs do not meet the universal Swagger spec standards, there would be a need to create custom integrations and custom code configurations to enable the LCDP to accept these APIs. A pitfall to look out for would be that LCDP in consideration could be tied to a particular technology and only supports integrations within the said locked technology landscape (for example - Microsoft™ / Salesforce® / ServiceNow™). This can limit or eliminate the scope of integrating with other third-party systems that use other technologies.

What is the turnaround time needed?

With the LCDP being developer-centric and open standards-based, it is easily adoptable by developers. The ability of the platform to generate standards-based code that is human readable, editable and extensible gives developers a sense of security and ownership. This puts the developers in their comfort zone to be able to adopt a new development tool or a platform, and the learning curve is neither steep nor long. With the help of the support channels, documentation and training, the adoption time coupled with the understanding of best practices creates a seamless transition for developers to feel confident with the platform of choice. A realistic time estimate for a developer to attain low-medium proficiency with a LCDP can be 1-2 months and high-expert proficiency may span 3-4 months.

How much control do users want to retain over code?

An LCDP providing code-level controls is definitely a good-to-have feature when choosing an LCDP. An LCDP that provides access and control to the generated code provides development teams with transparency and ownership which may be in general; lacking in LCDPs that do not provide code control or access. Development teams can now understand and read the generated code allowing the possibility to bring in more complex customisations and integrations to meet the high standards of enterprise-grade use case requirements.

The advantage of a LCDP that generates code and provides code-level controls can be seen in the versatile use-cases of the platform. There can also be scenarios where development teams need not want access to the generated code/perform code-level changes, which is befitting for such requirements. A good LCDP platform caters to this segment of developers as well.

Does the application need to factor in security considerations?

All enterprise applications need to come with enterprise-grade security measures to safeguard the applications from external threats making them robust and secure. It is a good practice to look out for LCDP platforms that have certain out-of-the-box security certifications in place like OWASP Top 10 vulnerability attacks. This saves time and effort to perform individual tests as the platform already possesses these safeguards.

LCDPs that generate code need to take care of the code quality and standards to minimize flaws in their first-party code. Having a certified status by companies like Veracode, Checkmarx or Acunetix etc. represents a high standard of security practices in the generated code. In addition to this, LCDP platforms should have the provision to connect with existing enterprise authentication and authorization mechanisms to blend in. Out-of-the-box integrations with LDAP, Active Directory, OpenID, CAS, SAML etc. with the support for SSO help developers configure security tasks and authentication with ease, for respective application use cases.

Low-code fosters continuous innovation and allows you to create at the speed of change. There is a wide range of low-code tech out there, be wise to evaluate how these platforms perform in context to your enterprise and development needs, the right platform can accelerate productivity, produce secure and scalable apps, with great user experiences, enabling your teams to go to market faster.

Authored by Vikram Srivats, Chief Commercial Officer, WaveMaker, Inc

After the grueling stress test of a global pandemic, corporations must now contend with the stresses of war and a weakening macroeconomic environment and yet transform to become modern, composable, and competitive enterprises. Technology executives at the center of this transformation are pursuing bold yet pragmatic strategies, including building and scaling new software-driven business capabilities quickly. For them, the holy grail seems to be democratizing software application development itself – with low-code/no-code (LCNC) approaches – to deliver at speed and at scale to the business.

Professional developers and enterprise architects get involved in governing LCNC development as enterprises become deliberate about policies, processes, and people to scale this movement responsibly. But pro-coders themselves are not yet active adopters of LCNC platforms – they range from interested observers (at best) to those that detest LCNC platforms (for valid reasons).

Based on industry estimates, around 35-40% of a pro coder’s time is spent in setting up, creating guardrails, importing, and integrating with data sources, writing code from scratch, making code secure, testing and retesting applications, managing source control, and versioning, adding internationalization, making them accessible, optimizing for performance, and maintaining or upgrading applications. Another 30% of the time is spent on non-technical or operational activities. That leaves less than half of their productive time for thinking, innovating, and crafting complex and compelling apps and experiences.

Clearly, pro-coders experience pain. So, what should low-code platforms offer to entice pro-coders to adopt and, better yet, embrace them? Let’s dig in.

Rule 1: Be Open. Provide Familiarity and Visibility

What if a low-code platform used an open standards-based, popular tech stack (React, Angular, and Bootstrap for UI; Spring for backend; Docker containers)? What if developers could actually see and read real (not model-generated or metadata-driven) code being generated? What if this code was written the way they code?

Pro coders are accustomed to seeing, reading, and understanding real code in a language or framework that is open and widely accepted. So, just give it to them.

Rule 2: Custom Everything

Developers need the ability to add fine-grained logic to their applications; that is, writing custom services or creating custom APIs in a code editor alongside the drag-and-drop canvas.

Low-code platforms should offer developers the ability to configure each out-of-the-box widget to a high degree to allow for creating visually captivating experiences.

Imagine if developers could go beyond a standard UI widget library and create their own custom components – building blocks of API-infused UI – and add them to their private library. Sometimes, developers may also need to import pre-built components (React or Angular or GraphQL components exported as standard Web Components) into their low-code development platform and reuse them.

Finally, developers may want to create their own application theme – a combination of fonts, layouts, colors, and styles – to create a differentiated yet consistent branded user experience across one or more applications or products.

Rule 3: Integrate Easily with Data Sources. Set Up Quickly.

Integration and extraction from data sources such as APIs (REST, SOAP, or WebSocket), databases (such as MySQL, Maria DB, PostgreSQL, Oracle DB, SQL Server, IBM DB2, Amazon Redshift, SAP Hana, HSQL, and Mongo DB) or streaming data sources (like Kafka embedded in the app) – must be supported and be effortless.

CRUD operations are usually hardcoded by the developer and take up a lot of time. If a low-code platform could automatically generate all the CRUD APIs once the data source is imported, it cuts down the development time immensely. Similarly, an editable abstraction of the database that replicates the schema of the DB can help developers manipulate the data from within the platform itself.

Once imported, developers should be able to bind their UI easily and quickly to the backend via passing variables. Data from a REST call should then be easily displayed as entities on a page without any workarounds or wordy importing and model definition. Likewise, with a Swagger import, descriptions should be able to handle reusing the same model in multiple endpoints or recursive models.

Rule 4: Apps Must Be Secure, Scalable, and Performant

For user authentication, developers may need to integrate with database, LDAP, Active Directory, SAML, and other authentication providers. SSO should be easily enabled with support for SAML federation and Central Authentication Server (CAS). For authorization, low-code platforms need to support coarse as well as fine-grained permissions that extend across pages, individual widgets on a page, and even individual APIs exposed by the application.

Developers look for protection against OWASP vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, brute force attacks, SQL injection) and support of encryption standards such as TLS 1.2+ during app hosting. Ideally, low-code platforms need to be certified by security leaders like Veracode who perform rigorous static and dynamic tests (iAST, SAST, DAST, and SCA).

Through session-less architecture, distributed caching, horizontal scaling through containers, and UI framework-specific performance features (for example, Angular 13 has lazy loading, Brotli compression, tree shaking, Ivy), developers using low-code platforms can build highly performant apps, minimizing chattiness and UI-to-backend roundtrips. As an example, instead of storing the state in a session, it can be backed by a distributed cache (such as Redis) to allow apps to scale horizontally.

Rule 5: Deploy Anywhere, Anyhow

Developers cannot be constrained to a vendor-specific app deployment infrastructure. They need the freedom and flexibility to host their apps anywhere – on any public, private, or hybrid Cloud, on K8s clusters, or on bare metal/on-premise infrastructure. Low-code platforms that offer a development model where the UI is decoupled from the backend, can allow UI and backend artifacts to be separately packaged and deployed (UI to CDN; as an example, backend to a standard Java server like Tomcat) using a standard archive or a Docker image.

Rule 6: Complex and Long-Lived Apps & Large-Scale Platforms

Developers hand-code some of the most complex apps and systems in use today. They need low-code platforms to step up to the plate and deliver equally complex apps that can be sustainable over the long term in terms of maintenance and enhancements.

For example, low-code platforms need to integrate with 3rd party BPM tools (Camunda, jBPM, Flowable, Activity) that help developers orchestrate detailed workflows/tasks and need to support a full 2-way data exchange with the BPM tool’s runtime engine. Within low-code platforms, developers will expect to easily manipulate complex data (pick a certain number of arrays and use logic to combine them into a new set of arrays) and easily represent complex graphs without custom styling/CSS or tangling with data formats.

Developers may need to conditionally retrieve data using a parent-child relationship, be able to localize and internationalize applications, handle complex core code merges and upgrades with customized apps in deployment, deal with Swagger changes pushed to already imported Swagger files without rewiring all the variables, write and support complex business logic interleaved with visual development, support multiple app themes at runtime, support apps as deep links, set click targets to measure/launch intents or URLs, and so on.

Rule 7: No Vendor Lock-In, Restrictions, or Fine Print

Lock-in is a strict no for developers who value independence and freedom. That starts with access to generated code. Low-code platforms that do well in this space readily offer developers the ability to not only see and read generated code but also to export source code outside of the platform to an IDE of their choice.

Developers also don’t like low-code platforms that force them to use their runtime environment to deploy their apps, effectively locking developers and their employers into the platform through the app’s lifecycle. Lastly, from a licensing perspective, low-code platforms that restrict developers to a limited number of apps, app objects, or end users effectively throttle developers to a commercial model that becomes quickly expensive with usage and more apps.

Rule 8: Modern (Cloud-Native) Environments, Practices, and Standards

Developers using cloud-native low-code platforms benefit in terms of collaboration, ease of access, availability, flexibility, security, frequent and easy upgrades, horizontal scaling, and the overall unit economics of the model for their app development and deployment.

Developer-friendly low-code platforms generate code using modern design patterns (for example, a Java maven project) enabling developers to see, extend, and customize code across all layers of the application stack. They enable every user to have a workspace running as a container instance. When an app is built, a repo is automatically created for it in the low-code platform’s source control/Git (and integrated with Prometheus/EFK for logs and metrics).

Finally, developers appreciate low-code platforms that embrace modern standards, say Android Material Design specification for visual design and building interaction across multiple devices using out-of-the-box widgets and themes. They value the ability to create functional, distributable, reusable, API-integrated, and independently testable experience components. Low-code platforms that offer twelve-factor standards assure developers that their apps are trustworthy.

Rule 9: Play Well with Design, Build, Test, and Release Processes and Toolsets

Developers using low-code platforms will want their apps to connect to, integrate with, or be embedded in other hand-coded apps. Beyond iFrame support, low-code platforms that support embedding via a micro frontend approach (such as Single SPA) offer sophisticated functionality for developers to create seamless end-to-end experiences that cover high-code and low-code developed apps.

Professional application development teams tend to use design tools like Figma, Sketch, or UXPin; QA tools like Selenium, Protractor, or Karma for testing web apps; Appium for testing mobile apps; and performance testing tools and app profilers like AppDynamics or New Relic. DevOps teams have a plethora of tools for the build, test, integration, and deployment processes. Post-deployment, developers would like to monitor app performance events, and page tracking via Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics. Low-code platforms that endear themselves to developers will have to play well and integrate seamlessly with these toolsets and design, build, test, release, and monitoring processes.

Lastly, while low-code platforms may provide their own VCS (such as Gitlab), they need to offer easy integration with external repositories like GitHub or Bitbucket. Developers should be able to pull, view, and push changes and merge conflicts between source control systems. They will appreciate low-code platforms that support app versioning from code-level commits to component-level and application-level versioning for releases (including a major or minor version format), allowing multiple versions of the app to co-exist in different deployment environments such as test, stage, or pre-production.

Rule 10: Future-Proof Me, My Apps, and My Employer

A UI developer or backend developer using low-code platforms should be able to develop a complete application with, for example, a basic knowledge of SQL, JS/Java, and zero DevOps, and transform to full-stack developers. Using the Java world as an example, developers don’t need knowledge of advanced JS framework, HTML5, CSS, Bootstrap, Spring, ORM, REST, advanced SQL, native device programming, mobile integration, building and running Docker scripts, or manual integration with CI/CD pipelines.

For technology stack upgrades for apps built using a low-code platform, developers should be able to open apps in the target version of a low-code platform with the latest tech stack (as an example, Angular 14 for UI). The app upgrade should be automatic, and the transition seamless.

Developers and CTOs/CIOs alike are constantly worrying about creating technical debt for the future. Enterprise-friendly low-code platforms are built on an open-standards-based modern tech stack, shift the burden of tech upgrades to the platform, offer source code that is extensible outside of the platform using commonly available skillsets, and play well with a modern enterprise’s toolsets, practice, and standards.

Originally published in Embedded Computing Design

A freshly minted React Native studio, developer tools, API composer toolkit, Angular 12 update, Azure Repos VCS, MLTS for REST APIs, and the list goes on………

WaveMaker is a composable experience development platform powered by the paradigm of low-code. With every new release, we at WaveMaker, attempt to carve out features that help enterprises and professional developers build captivating user experiences in sync with market demand.

Enterprises can embrace composability only when the tools that they adopt enable it. Keeping that in mind, our team at WaveMaker has built the next big thing for the world of composability through low-code—WaveMaker 11.

Here is what we have got for you this year!

Create truly native apps with React Native

With around 3.8 billion smartphone users worldwide, mobile app builders are constantly looking at ways to drive better engagement, reduce drop-offs and increase in-app growth. In short, mobile app adoption is driven by the user experience that they offer. 

On the other hand, ISVs and enterprises find it difficult to create consumer-grade mobile applications with run-of-the-mill tools that are either specific to a device or OS or, simply do not have an integrated platform to create both web and mobile apps. Moreover, customers are not content with responsive web experiences force-fitted within mobile apps. The UI and the associated user experience on web apps are just not good enough.

Building compelling user experiences such as smoother onboarding, faster startup, slick transitions, customer-centric features, native feature accessibility, and contextual awareness becomes easier with an app development platform that is tailor-made to create cross-platform native apps. 

These are the factors that our team at WaveMaker kept in mind while crafting the WaveMaker React Native studio. In fact, there is an entire WaveMaker UI component library in the React Native studio that lets customers design and build mobile applications leveraging the low-code productivity that WaveMaker is famous for. Let us look at some of the salient features:

• The React Native studio offers platform-specific versions of components so that a single codebase can share code across Android and iOS stores.

• Developers who are already proficient with WaveMaker do not have to learn React Native all over again to develop mobile apps. The business logic can be written in Javascript and the developer experience remains unchanged. 

• Apps built on the React Native studio render exceptional performance owing to the fact that the Javascript code gets interpreted on Hermes(a Javascript engine optimized for React Native).

• Prefabs (pre-fabricated components) built using WaveMaker components can be reused across mobile and web projects. Through prefabs, our customers can accelerate implementations by creating reusable abstractions and codifying user experiences in all form factors.

• Using our “App Chef”, building the mobile project to generate installers for Android and iOS is simply a click away. The WaveMaker build infrastructure will produce completely optimized files ready to be listed on the App Stores.

With React Native studio added to its kitty, WaveMaker is raising the bar in mobile app experience development one notch higher. Additionally, all web applications created in WaveMaker can be also made available as Progressive Web Applications, offering a plethora of choices for our customers.

We truly believe that if you are already a WaveMaker subscriber or considering the platform for your mobile app development efforts, the addition of React Native studio to the platform increases the value of your investment substantially.

To know more about the WaveMaker React Native studio, click here.

Move to Angular 12

The application modernization services market size is estimated to grow to $24.8 billion by 2025. A large chunk of this modernization effort can simply be attributed to upgrading the tech stack or modernizing the UI. However, in many cases, the cost of upgradation and the configuration hassles that come with it outweigh the benefits of modernization and as a result, companies are forced to take a step back. 

At WaveMaker, we have always promised that upgrading to the latest version of WaveMaker also includes upgrading to the latest tech stack. This is by default.

WaveMaker 11 GA has upgraded to Angular 12 from Angular 11. This simply means that if you open any of your applications previously built on older versions of WaveMaker in WaveMaker 11, they automatically get upgraded to Angular 12. The ROI in terms of cost and time, in this case, is substantially higher when compared to a manual upgrade.

Orchestrate APIs with API Composer Toolkit

Customers need seamless and smooth user experiences. Building such performant applications needs an API backend that is fast. The new release aims to bring composability to the API layer, allowing multiple APIs to be combined together to create unified experience APIs. 

The API Composer Toolkit allows WaveMaker developers to build APIs on top of existing systems that are just right in terms of verbosity and comply with the “Principle of Least Privilege” security rules. Using the Spring framework, this tool allows the creation of unified experience APIs that are designed keeping in mind the  ‘backend for the frontend’ design pattern. With API Composer Toolkit, developers can now leverage the use of a single Java Service API that calls multiple APIs(REST/Swagger/Database) and consolidates their responses into one Response Object thereby reducing time and code complexity.

To know more about the API Composer Toolkit, click here.

Get support for Azure Repos VCS

WaveMaker Studio already comes with a version control system that runs within your platform machine. This is based on Gitlab. Additionally, WaveMaker Teams customers can choose to add an external repo of their choice like their own instance of GitLab, GitHub, or BitBucket. With WaveMaker 11, team admins can configure Azure Repos Version Control System (VCS) for storing project source code. You can now easily set up CI/CD pipelines to build and deploy WaveMaker-built applications on top of your enterprise version control system. Not only is there a reduction in the total cost of ownership of WaveMaker, but it also enables Teams customers to use existing IT infrastructure.

 For more information, see Azure Repos Code Repository.

MTLS for REST APIs in WaveMaker Apps

WaveMaker has always stayed true to its promise of building applications that are safe, secure, and easy to run. Enabling an additional security layer by configuring MTLS (Mutual Transport Layer Security) for all REST APIs is a feature directed toward building secure apps. With this feature, when you import APIs into WaveMaker to build your apps, you can now set up the SSL connection between WaveMaker and your APIs to use MTLS.

For more information, see MTLS in the WaveMaker application and a detailed blog about MTLS.

Supporting MongoDB for Session Persistence

WaveMaker applications are built to 12Factors.app principles. One of the ways WaveMaker apps can be deployed on horizontally scaled infrastructure is to build them to be stateless. With WaveMaker 11, application sessions can now be configured to use a distributed cache. We already support DB, and REDIS and have now added MongoDB to offer more flexibility during the deployment.

Debug and monitor with Devtool - a WaveMaker Chrome Extension

Debugging and monitoring your applications can be a daunting task. Make debugging your application easier with WaveMaker Devtool. Installing this chrome extension will let you debug and monitor WaveMaker 11 applications in preview via the ‘inspect’ mode. To further enhance developer productivity, this browser plugin enables developers to track and profile API invocations, page load times, prefab load/render times, etc.

Leverage the change in the POM hierarchy

Take advantage of a simple yet powerful pom.xml and create a clear separation of the WaveMaker platform from application-specific dependencies. The new POM contains fewer lines than before and has been remodeled to inherit from the parent POM making it easily readable and comprehensible.

Upgrade to the new version of SAML

All WaveMaker projects that are using SAML(spring-security-saml2-core) as a security provider will be migrated to a new version of SAML thus removing the dependency on Spring extensions that have reached the end of life.

Collaborate with ‘Teams’ on WaveMaker Enterprise

Teams, a collaborative development environment is now shipped with WaveMaker Enterprise too. Within one enterprise installation, you can onboard multiple Teams, while giving each Team ability to manage projects, roles, and code repositories, add or remove team members, grant permissions, and more. Read this blog to know more about what Teams can do for you.

Summary

Our freshly minted React Native studio brings low-code and React Native mobile frameworks together, allowing mobile app composition using prefabs. For a WaveMaker developer, there is no new learning curve; for a mobile developer, there is the flexibility of low-code, the feature-rich app development framework, and the support for easy composability.

This new release is a milestone for WaveMaker. This release, while offering composability at the API layer, allows unified experience development. Additionally, the API Mock Server increases developer productivity with mock APIs that can be created during development. This enables UI development teams to continue building the experiences using low code without the need for a fully developed/functional API. 

WaveMaker 11 GA brings with it a host of other features that increases the value proposition of being subscribed to WaveMaker. From Flex Layout Widgets, Java 11 upgrade, and pagination for imported APIs, to multi-version studios, WaveMaker 11 GA aims to increase the value proposition for WaveMaker subscribers and prospects alike. With this release, we can truly say that composability and seamless native mobile app development is just an upgrade away!

WaveMaker 11 GA - Build Components. Compose Journeys. Differentiate the Experience

To read the full list of features in WaveMaker 11, please read the release notes here.

Make data more digestible

A byte about visual modeling and programming

Visual modeling and visual programming techniques transform numbers into visual elements such as charts, maps, graphs, and tables using standard graphical notations. Data visualization is crucial in supporting real-time decision making and has become a core feature in modern application development platforms. Visual modeling and programming not only allow you to build a model of your system or application, but also to model systems easier, faster and more accurately on the front-end, while maintaining the syntaxes and semantics at the back-end.

Try Model-Driven Development

Today’s software and application demands require a ready-to-use foundation before anything is built on it. To eliminate iterations in your application development lifecycle, a powerful approach is to adopt model-driven development. By using a model as a starting point to describe your business semantics and then generating application artifacts from that model, you can deliver applications faster with higher productivity.

What low-code platforms have brought to the table in terms of visual modeling and programming, is easy-to-use, drag and drop features, and customizable widgets, helping you to create critical and device-agnostic applications with responsive dashboards.

Whether it is full or partial dependency, find out what type of Model-Driven App Development Approach suits your business and application development needs.

Achieve data visualization with minimal coding

Take Visual Modeling and Programming to Next Level Using Low-Code

“It took a single developer 1 week to build an entire application!” Find out how low-code addressed a real-world problem using visual modelling techniques.

The Low-Code Leverage

Advantages of using WaveMaker for visual modeling and programming

Visual programming and visual modeling just got easier. You can instantly create a chart, plot a map, or build a dashboard to visualize data from any source using WaveMaker. By using built-in widgets and prefabs, you can build applications within days without any need for coding.

Low-code means different things to different people. While the industry is exploding with low-code platforms, ours is purpose-built for professional developers. If you are already using a low-code platform or shopping for one, there are many critical factors to consider. Read on..

Start with these simple questions first

Will I be the owner of the code?
The code should be yours to mix, extend, customize, transfer or export

What should “no lock-in” mean to me?
No shackles of run-time cost, proprietary architecture, and limited infra options

Will the developers need to be certified to use the platform?
You want quick learning and future-proofing your teams’ skills

Is my vendor’s pricing strategy sustainable?
Scaling up shouldn’t disproportionately increase the cost of doing business

CODERS love low code when

• It generates code that they can easily extend.
• API endpoints are generated for all kinds of data.
• They have full application source control.
• There is no runtime dependency on the studio.
• They can mix and maintain their own code.

CXOS like low code when

• Their teams need no reskilling.
• Their existing process are not disrupted.
• They pay for developer seats, not apps for users.
• It runs on the infrastructure(s) of their choice.
• Licensing model is transparent and promotes scale.

WaveMaker saves

Reduce repetitive development work and save heaps in time and effort.

Explore the unique requirements of enterprise application development and learn how to choose the right enterprise application development software.

Enterprise Application Development is a complex process of creating application for business purposes. They are complex, customized for critical business requirements and can be deployed on the cloud, on a variety of platforms across corporate networks, intranet etc. Designing and developing such enterprise applications means satisfying hundreds or thousands of separate requirements.

How are Enterprise Applications Different ?

An enterprise applications are large multi user, multi developer and a multi component applications that can work on large chunks of data and utilise extensive parallel processing, network distributed resources and complex logic. These applications can be deployed across multiple platforms and operate simultaneously with many other applications.Enterprise applications are business oriented and deployed to meet specific business requirements. They encode business policies, processes, rules and entities and are developed with specific business requirements in mind. Hence, these applications require special tools in the form of enterprise application development software to cater to their unique needs.

Traditional Enterprise Application Development Software and their Shortcomings

Though traditional application development methodologies, are known for having clear objectives, stable requirements and measurable progress of development, they are time consuming, have minimum iterations and there is very little customer interaction. Hence, traditional application development methodologies and tools are unable to fulfill the demands of modern enterprise applications.The failure is not just for web applications, traditional methodologies are not a perfect match for mobile application development as well. Some of their shortcomings are

• These Application are linear and predictive. They follow sequential flow and make any new changes time consuming and difficult
• Applications are low in productivity due to high lead times and time consuming.
• The application development Involves stringent documentation and reviews at every stage which are done by developers mostly. Thus the business imperatives naturally take a back seat.
• User or the customer is involved at the beginning during the requirements stage and then in the end delivery during user acceptance stage. Their is no active involvement from users in the intermediate phases which lead to many changes in the end thus increasing cost and time
• Elements have to be designed and constructed from the ground up as per project requirements and hence, are not reusable.

Hence it can be summed up that Enterprises today are in the look out for better tools, applications and software as the traditional methodologies could not gain much success.

Changing Trends in Enterprise Application Development

New and Emerging trends in Enterprise Application is impacting application development in a big way. Let us see the key trends :

Usability (UX) – Usability is the norm of the day in when it comes to Enterprise Architecture. Users expect their apps to be more intuitive and provide more relevant content suited to their own business needs. In the coming year, developers will have to focus more on ease of usability and responsive design.

Consumerization of IT– Consumerization of IT has impacted Enterprise Application’s changing landscape. Technology today is consumer oriented. Business imperatives are given utmost importance.

Commodity Computing (cloud), horizontal scaling – Applications today are hosted , developed and customised on the cloud . Cloud computing has increased accessibility and ease of operation for users of Enterprise application development.

Rapid Application Delivery & Low-code Development – RAD or Low-code development is the new trend in Enterprise. Minimal Coding is making Enterprise Application Development more business centric and easy. Customers are involved at each phase of development.

Loose Coupling (APIs, Microservices, Composable architecture) – With the introduction of Loose Coupling and microservices enterprise applications are delivered as an independent runtime service with a well defined API. The Microservices approach allow faster delivery of smaller incremental changes to an application.

Traditional methodologies of application development are very rigid and process oriented. They involve a series of steps like requirement, definition, planning, building, testing and deployment which lead to high cycle times at each stage. The traditional format requires projects with large teams and strict roles while maintaining stringent documentation and review at every stage of development. The customer interaction is minimal which takes place during the beginning and the end of the project. Every element that is designed in a project needs to be designed from scratch and is not reusable. All this translates to,

Choosing the right enterprise application development platforms

Modern enterprise Application development focusses on reducing application development timelines and at the same time addresses a whole gamut of other related aspects of modern web applications required for today’s modern Enterprise. Modern day application is rapid in terms of timeline, cost, and usability . We call them RAD ( Rapid Application Development) and they emphasizes on:

Ready-made Application Infrastructure: Providing a browser based development environment. No more hassle of installing, setup, ongoing configuration etc.

Usability: Making sure good-looking and rich user interactive applications can be developed. Increased attention to creating pixel perfect responsive UI applications on both Desktop as well as Mobile Devices.

Full Stack Development: By leveraging modern client side frameworks and server side technologies, Modern RAD is now capable to auto generate code for the entire application (client side, Server side as well as integration touch points to external systems and services via APIs).

Pre-Defined Best of Breed Technology Stack: Providing a pre-defined well tested best of breed of software components as the technology stack for application development. No more worries about enterprises having to maintain multiple teams to support complex permutations of technology stacks.

Business User Participation: Simplifying the application development process such that technical business users can work together with professional developers in developing the application. This greatly benefits enterprises as business user comes in with domain knowledge and can validate the implementation, as it is being developed.

API-led Integration: Providing REST API based integration approach such that application can easily integrate to an internal, external as well as Cloud based service. This allows for faster, easier development and avoids reinventing the wheel again.

WaveMaker – the ideal enterprise application development software

WaveMaker is an award winning rapidly Enterprise application development and delivery platform that helps create enterprise grade web and mobile apps. With over 10 years of market presence, thousands of developers use it to create applications 67% faster.

WaveMaker’s software platform revolutionizes how enterprises build, deliver and manage modern custom applications, improving business agility and fostering innovation. WaveMaker leverages the latest trends and technologies in Rapid App Development (RAD) such as multi-device auto-responsive interfaces and componentized app assembly, Docker for app-optimized container deployment on private infrastructures, and APIs and Microservices Architecture (MSA) for scalable integration.

• Visual development that delivers web and mobile apps at the speed of business
• Instant migration of legacy applications based on proprietary technologies such as Lotus Notes, MS Access, Oracle Forms, etc.
• Centralized IT for all the applications with hassle-free continuous integration and release management
• Single platform that works for business users as well as professional developers
• Future-proof platform that is based on open standards and technologies trusted by millions of developers
• No vendor lock in with flexible deployment and export options Offers the lowest total cost of ownership and transparent pricing

Get Started with a free 30 day trial of WaveMaker Enterprise Web Application Platform.

A RAD approach to build future-ready apps​
One way to drive the adoption of applications is to build one that’s customized to the user. When you have teams within teams, from cross-functional to self-managing teams, every user, from an IT leader to a line of business (LoB) executive, demands modern applications designed to their requirements. The essence of agile enterprises is to create value and flexibility for business users with fluid IT capabilities.

IT cannot deliver all the custom apps that your business needs Address the pace of your application development needs with Custom Application Development Services

Create new or extend existing applications

• Create data models, relationships and database constraints from existing system of records
• Develop auto-import pipeline for existing database schema with support for multiple database platforms
• Enable connection to Mobile backend services (MBaaS) of your choice (like AWS Mobile Services and Azure Mobile Services) for identity management & sync, analytics, push notifications, and more
• Develop new integrations (or) connect with existing web services APIs (REST and SOAP) to enable an API-based custom application development
• Customize application development

Create native experiences

• Enable access to native device features like camera, location, network, battery, contacts, local storage and more in your enterprise app
• Accelerate app performance by leveraging offline storage
• Develop native themes and UI controls (HTML5) that adapt to any screen of choice
• custom app development

Drive application adoption and use

• Create internal developer network and app stores
• Automate and implement app version controls and revision policies

Build enterprise-grade, custom applications that are future-ready with wavemaker

• Great looking apps out of the box : Quicken event driven navigation and create consistent design using pre-built themes and app templates.
• Extensible code base : Easily extend or maintain code generated using your favorite IDE.
• No code lock-in : Generate code that can be exported as a ZIP or WAR file and is Maven compliant, Open Source.
• Lower infra TCO with Docker : Use a lightweight Docker-based containerization model that runs 2-3 times faster than VMs.
• Accelerate API reuse : Drag & drop use and re-use custom built “Prefabs” to accelerate application development.

RAD platforms such as WaveMaker are revolutionizing how enterprises build, deliver, and manage modern custom applications. Improve business agility, foster innovation and accelerate application development.

Accelerate the journey to cloud-native, omnichannel, microservices-based enterprise-grade applications with a composable experience platform powered by low-code.

A McKinsey survey found that in 2021, “companies devoted more resources to their digital and technology capabilities during the pandemic, even as they cut resources from other parts of the business.”

This should come as no surprise given the dramatic change in business models, competitive landscape, and customer behavior seen in the last couple of years. In response, enterprises across the globe are modernizing their application stack to increase agility and performance, and provide compelling customer experiences.

What is application modernization?

Application modernization is the process of identifying legacy apps—which are typically on-premise, monolithic, and written in outdated languages—and modernizing them into cloud-native, omnichannel, microservices-based, feature-rich digital applications rich with intuitive customer experiences.

It is important to note that application modernization is not just about upgrading the software. It is often also accompanied by a modernization of processes to be more agile with shorter release cycles and the transformation of the organization itself to be more experimental and innovative.

What does application modernization entail?

An application modernization initiative is driven by changes across the three levels of the app: Experience, integration, and architecture.

Experience modernization

Upgrading the user experience (UX) layer for a more modern, responsive, cross-platform design to deliver personalized experiences to customers.

API modernization and integration

Making legacy data accessible through channels like the cloud, mobile, web, etc. via APIs. A well-managed API serves as a mechanism for enterprises to leverage their digital assets and build new products around their core capabilities.

Architecture modernization

Transforming the architectural foundation of applications by adopting modern technologies to enable agility, scalability, portability, speed-to-market, development efficiency, and ongoing innovation.

Cloud-native architecture

Using hybrid architectures including public and private clouds allowing an enterprise to move workloads between the two platforms. Sensitive data can be hosted on a private cloud for security while big data applications can be stored on a public cloud for cost efficiency.

Microservices

Leveraging modular, distributed, small, single-purpose applications called microservices that deliver services using APIs. Microservices is poised to take scalability and continuous delivery to the next levels in the years to come.

Containerization

Building portability and reducing infra dependency with containers, which wrap up an application in a complete filesystem that has everything it needs to run: code, runtime, system tools, and system libraries. This enables it to run smoothly regardless of any environment.

DevOps

Transforming development methodologies from traditional waterfall towards DevOps and DevSecOps models, bringing agility, speed, and efficiency into enterprise teams. It empowers technology teams with experimentation and innovation capabilities, so they can adapt to market needs more effectively.

Why do enterprises need application modernization?

Traditionally, applications are built around operational efficiency—delivering the best possible service in the cheapest way they can. Today, this is not enough. Organizations need more. They need:

Differentiated and personalized experiences

In the rapidly changing world, customers demand their banking app or online shopping app to deliver the same sticky and personalized experience that their social media and gaming app offers. Legacy applications are unable to deliver this. To meet the customers where they are and deliver on their needs, enterprises need application modernization.

Faster time to market

Enterprises can not afford to build an internal team or outsource to an external vendor and wait for months to launch new features. For instance, when the pandemic hit and banks needed to sell online, they couldn’t wait a year to develop that capability. Today, taking digital experiences to the market quickly can be the most powerful competitive advantage. Legacy apps can’t enable that. IT modernization has the potential to reduce defects and time-to-market by up to 60%.

Optimizing costs

Legacy monolithic applications are large and take up significant resources to function. Application modernization breaks them down into smaller, manageable microservices, using only the resources that are absolutely necessary. Additionally, by leveraging composability, enterprises and software vendors can also create a repository of functional components that can be retrofit into existing applications, gradually replacing existing functionalities while not disturbing existing processes and thereby, reducing costs. With containers, modern libraries, and dynamic scaling of cloud platforms, organizations can save both real and opportunity costs of running enterprise applications.

Ongoing security

Every day, new threats are emerging online. Monitoring and protecting legacy applications can be a mammoth endeavor in itself. Application modernization enables enterprises to build more secure applications, shifting security left in the development process. Moreover, it also makes it easier to address security threats and deploy patches faster and more effectively.

Improved developer productivity

Legacy applications are often written in languages and follow processes that do not have the talent pool available to develop and maintain them. Containerization allows polyglot teams to function effectively together, setting up dev environments faster and ensuring that the app works on production environments the same way it did on the developer’s machine. With a composable approach, functional components created by IT teams can further be reused by business developers and implementation teams to quickly modernize smaller bits of applications. In fact, with IT modernization, enterprises increase employee productivity by up to 30% and motivation by up to 40%.

Organizational agility

More often than not, application modernization is not merely changing the software to a modern environment. It is accompanied by a cultural change towards building smaller services, deploying them in smaller cycles, receiving feedback, and optimizing continuously. To leverage cloud platforms, containers, DevOps processes, etc., the organization needs to transform itself into an agile and adaptive enterprise—a change that powers sustainable growth and profitability.

What are the key challenges in adopting application modernization?

While the benefits are overwhelming, enterprises continue to struggle to adopt application modernization for a range of reasons.

Dearth of talent

Application modernization initiatives often involve the transformation of mammoth applications. This not only requires technologists who understand cloud-native, microservices-based app development but also have a clear grasp of business logic and industry acumen. This combination of subject matter expertise and technology skills is a challenge to find.

Fear of disruption

IT leaders often fear disruption of their mission-critical enterprise applications, and rightly so. Moreover, the enterprise technology landscape can be so complex and precarious that touching one app can bring the entire deck of cards down. Therefore, creating the right application modernization strategy that ensures a smooth transition from legacy to modern applications remains a challenge.

Lack of budgets

Large-scale application modernization projects can be expensive, whether you’re building with an internal team or outsourcing it to an external vendor. Without a clear view of the return on investment, IT leaders struggle without the budgets to launch app modernization projects.

Large number of applications

A recent study found that enterprises use an average of 200 applications, with security, engineering, and IT using the most. While some of these are SaaS products, most tend to be legacy apps. Modernizing them all at once would be a significant burden on the company’s bottom line. Without repeatable architectures and composability, the redundancy of work will also be high.

IT and business not talking to each other

For any technology initiative to demonstrate value, it needs to meet the needs of the business. When IT and business teams don’t talk to each other, they run the risk of launching application modernization initiatives that don’t drive business results. This affects the organization’s—teams, leaders and the board included—enthusiasm towards application modernization.

Past failures

For decades, enterprises have attempted to modernize their applications with little success. A recent BCG study showed that “70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives, often with profound consequences.” Once bitten, twice shy, IT leaders resist taking the plunge again.

What do enterprises need for application modernization success?

Not all application modernization initiatives are the same. To ensure success, enterprises need to adopt an app modernization strategy that works for them. Here are some pointers to keep in mind.

Taking a business-centric approach:

It is not uncommon for enterprises to choose the oldest application to modernize first. This app modernization strategy, even when the project is successful, falls short of the business transformation it can deliver. Instead, we recommend that enterprises choose applications that offer the most valuable business capabilities. When an app modernization initiative delivers ROI, it makes it easier for the entire organization to get behind it.

Choosing the right application to modernize:

Gartner suggests that enterprises evaluate potential apps to modernize on six drivers. Three of them are business-related: business fit, business value, and agility; and the other three are technology-related: cost, complexity, and risk. The best opportunities offer transformation across multiple drivers.

Building a business case:

Whether you’re beginning a pilot project, or modernizing your nth application, a clear, strong, relevant, outcome-driven business case shields you against the risks of failure in several ways.

Creating progressive change:

Instead of entirely dumping the enterprise application for a modernized one, organizations must consider a progressive approach to breaking down monolithic apps for microservices-based ones. By integrating legacy systems with modern apps through APIs, enterprises can continue their business as usual without disruption, while building future-proof tech along the way.

Having a holistic view of modernization:

We believe that for application modernization to deliver on its promises, it must impact at three levels: Infrastructure, development, and delivery. A strong app modernization strategy must enable multi-cloud leverage, rapid and error-free containerized delivery to create open standards, multi-channel and microservices-based apps.

A modernization accelerator:

Time-sensitive and cost-conscious projects can not wait for months to build. They need the speed that can only be delivered through automation, simplified integrations, dynamic scale, etc. They need to minimize redundancies and reuse existing builds. They need a robust low-code platform to accelerate enterprise application development.

Rapid app modernization with low-code

What is low-code?

Low-code is a modern approach to agile software development. A low-code development platform helps developers create products visually by abstracting and automating commonly used components. Developers can easily drag and drop commonly used features instead of having to code extensively.

How does low-code help in application modernization?

Addressing all of the above challenges intuitively, low-code is one of the best app modernization tools available today.

• By abstracting and automating complex processes, it allows business users and subject matter experts to build applications at speed.
• With the ability to instantly turn existing business logic and services into consumable APIs for reuse, low-code platforms help avoid repetitive work.​​
• Tried, tested, and popular templates & prefabs accelerate the creation of responsive front-ends.
• Custom prefab repositories for user journeys enable composability, accelerating the creation of new apps or modernization of existing ones.
• API modernization and integrations enable enterprises to seamlessly transition from legacy apps to modern ones without disrupting the business.
• It offers significant cost savings, not just in development but also across deployment and long-term cloud usage.
• Developer-seat pricing and portable code enable long-term software investment protection as well.
• It helps build secure apps with RBAC and protection against Top 10 OWASP vulnerabilities.
• It future-proofs development by using the open standards-based stack for seamless extension, customization, and ownership of code.

How does application modernization with low-code work?

A good low-code platform serves as an app modernization tool that abstracts and automates processes at every stage of the software development lifecycle. How to choose the right platform for rapid app modernization with low-code?

While choosing the low-code platform for your application modernization strategy, ask yourself the following questions.

1. Is the platform suitable for professional developers?

A good low-code platform can be the app modernization tool of choice for professional coders, who want to build powerful, long-lived applications that offer a differentiated experience on the web and mobile, which can evolve with user needs.

2. Is the platform built on open standards?

A good low-code platform needs to have the foundation of open standards in order to ensure an open and extensible approach to application delivery. Also, the platform should use a best-of-breed application stack for developing full-stack applications.

3. Does the platform simplify external integration with inbuilt integrations?

A good low-code platform must enable out-of-the-box integrations for data and services. It must offer custom integrations to be built and reused across apps. It must also enable integrations with legacy applications for implementing incremental development.

For instance, the information and digital systems office of the State of Geneva incrementally modernized over 40 applications using WaveMaker while keeping the integrations intact for seamless BAU.

4. Does it offer cross-platform development?

A good low-code platform must offer the ability to create applications using a single code base that can adapt to any native platform or operating system, be it iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry/RIM, etc.

Canadian foodservice distributor, Flanagan, leveraged WaveMaker to achieve this. They reached out to WaveMaker to replace the existing application with a modern and responsive interface that provided a better, more consistent user experience across browsers and devices.

5. Does it handle scalability and cloud needs?

An end-to-end low-code platform will offer the ability to scale applications and handle private cloud needs. This will be in the form of features for rapid and continuous provisioning, deployment, instant scale-ability, and maximum utilization of resources.

6. Does it make it easy to create, share and consume APIs?

A robust platform will take an API-first approach to application delivery, making it easy to import data from any service and bind it to UI components.

7. Is it easy to maintain code?

A sustainability-focused low-code platform ensures maintainability, where the code generated follows design patterns, is well-organized, uses standard naming conventions, and generates documentation that developers can understand and maintain.

8. How well does the platform handle security?

A secure low-code platform will support flexible authentication and authorization mechanisms as well as integration support for popular identity management systems like AD, LDAP, SSO, and OAuth.

9. How well does the platform handle customizations?

A flexible low-code platform will allow customizations in the form of leveraging their existing systems or the ability to allow custom coding or integrations with modern AI and IoT-based systems.

10. How can the platform accelerate the development of multiple apps?

A good low-code platform not only accelerates the development of your first app but also strengthens the foundations of ongoing modernization. For instance, with a composable experience platform, you can create custom user journeys such as completing a transaction or creating a dashboard. This user journey can then be used to build new apps — all it takes is to plug and play. At each new app, users can customize it, if needed.

This is what J.J Richards, a WaveMaker customer, did while building a comprehensive set of 10 critical applications using a lean team within just 18 months!

11. Is the platform future-proof?

A good low-code platform should have the latest tech stack that allows you to build a modern responsive UI in your apps. The platform should make it easy to move your workload, i.e your applications to multi-clouds with containerization. Furthermore, the platform should be flexible in integrating or adapting to newer technologies and trends entering the market.

Like the Bank of Social Security, the Netherlands did while transitioning their mission-critical applications from the Microsoft framework to Java low-code in mere months.

Begin your application modernization journey with WaveMaker’s composable experience platform powered by low-code

WaveMaker is the most open, extensible, and flexible Low-code Platform that complements your enterprise application delivery while keeping in mind the requirements of Software Developers, Citizen Developers/Business Users, IT Architects, and CIOs.

Start a 30-day, free trial today at www.wavemaker.com/get-started