Forrester finds that, in 2020, over 27% of organizations improved their customer experience (CX) index scores, a big number compared to the few who were making progress in the years before.

“To emerge successfully from this global crisis, brands must build experiences that help them engage with their customers at an emotional level,” wrote Forrester SVP, Sharyn Leaver.

So, how do enterprises engage customers at an emotional level when the predominant
channel of interaction is now digital?

By delivering insights-driven, personalized, contextual, end-to-end digital customer experiences anytime, anywhere, across channels and devices.

To achieve this, at accelerated time-to-value and scale, enterprises need a springboard: A Digital Experience Platform.

Gartner defines a Digital Experience Platform (DXP), as an integrated set of technologies, based on a common platform, that provides a broad range of audiences with consistent, secure, and personalized access to information and applications across many digital touchpoints.

At WaveMaker, we visualize it in three layers:

• Foundational Business Engine
• Digital Engagement Hub, which brings together APIs from the business engine
• Customer Experience Suite, which is the UX layer, made up of apps

Most enterprises have the business engine and the digital engagement hub, even if some of them might be legacy software. However, the digital customer experience layer needs to respond to rapidly evolving needs, offering opportunities for experimentation and rapid implementation. It is here that low-code can help. Here’s how.

Transforming applications to a customer-oriented approach

In most industries, IT is designed around the organizational structure, not customer needs. For instance, the technology architecture of a retail organization is driven by the supply chain — divided into inventory, point of sale, customer relationship management, e-commerce, etc. So, if a customer wants to check on the company’s website whether a product is available in their nearby store, it would be next to impossible because the e-commerce engine doesn’t speak to the inventory management system.

A digital experience platform can enable enterprises to address such use cases without elaborate investments in product development. When the business engine is built on customer-oriented architecture, deploying applications as microservices, loosely coupled, and API-driven with functional encapsulation, the low-code customer experience suite empowers you to drag and drop any combination of features and functionalities to create a new app. It effortlessly abstracts the various business engines to create apps with little manual programming.

Leveraging data for personalized digital experience

No customer wants to search and scroll endlessly on their shopping app to find the product they want. Nor do they want to manually drag and drop features into their interface to personalize it themselves. They want personalized experiences that are meaningful, engaging, and, most importantly, efficient.

A digital experience platform can leverage advanced analytics to deliver that. The low-code customer experience suite can form the abstraction over the analytics engine to bring together user, interaction, and business data to create a 360-degree view of the customer. It can enable dynamic user experiences, ensuring continuity of customer relationships, displaying cross-sell/up-sell opportunities contextually.

Delivering omnichannel engagement

In the era of ‘hand-off’ between devices, customers demand a smooth omnichannel experience from enterprises. For instance, an e-commerce customer today wants to add items to their cart from any device, anywhere, anytime, and purchase them all together when they’re ready.

Digital experience platforms are built to enable this seamlessly. By integrating various digital business engines, the low-code customer experience suite allows you to build omnichannel customer journeys — effortlessly moving from one channel to another, ensuring continuity of engagement across devices.

Enabling dynamic content delivery

Traditional applications are optimized for short-term transactions, while digital experience platforms are built to create long-term customer value. For instance, an e-commerce application is typically built around capabilities like search and checkout, focussing on the efficiency of shopping. But customers today are seeking more engagement. Perhaps why social commerce — blending of social media like Instagram and shopping — is gaining popularity, as it stresses the ‘experience' of shopping.

The digital customer experience suite enables enterprises, especially in industries like banking, media, retail, or fashion to design websites, portals, apps, etc. to deliver personalized, contextual, relevant, and timely content to improve stickiness and loyalty.

Ensuring end-to-end digital service

Today, saying “you need to come to the store to get this done” is a sure-shot way of losing a customer, especially given that the cost of switching to a new provider is the lowest it has ever been. However, traditional shelf-ware is heavily restrictive in the functionalities they can offer.

Digital experience platforms enable you to deliver end-to-end digital service. With the customer engagement suite, enterprises can:

• Build and deploy new applications quickly for customers
• Enable dashboards with predictive analytics for employees
• Create chatbots to automate answers to common concerns
• Automate data collection in the form of feedback through email, SMS, or app notifications
• Streamline product and business innovation based on customer behavior and preferences

In 2018, PwC found 32% of customers say they would stop doing business with a brand after one bad experience, even if they had loved it before. On the other hand, customers are willing to pay a 7-16% price premium for a good experience. This becomes even more telling in the post-pandemic era.

Today, just offering a digital avenue isn’t enough. The digital channel(s) is the storefront, relationship manager, customer service, marketing, sales, product catalog — all rolled into one. The true success of a digital channel is in dynamically adapting to customer needs. A digital experience platform helps you achieve that.

With a robust low-code customer experience suite built with WaveMaker, you can accelerate your digital experience platform journey significantly. Its ability to provide features such as a composable architecture, scalability, cloud-native capabilities, customizability, repeatability and security strengths enable your application teams to create differentiated experiences at a fraction of the time and cost.

To see how low-code can accelerate your digital platform journey, try a demo of WaveMaker today.

Authored by Gopi Mishra, Principal Architect - Development, WaveMaker, Inc

Enterprises are increasingly using ‘Direct-to-Consumer’ digital initiatives. They are parallelly digitizing their internal processes with increased velocity. These changes bring with them a tide of security threats. From insider threats to exposed marketplaces, there is always a security hazard lurking around the corner--one that can assume mammoth proportions if security doesn’t become an ingrained part of application development. In fact, according to a report by cyber security firm 'Checkpoint', cyberattacks on organizations worldwide jumped by 29% during the first half of 2021 as compared to the same period in the previous year.

So if an enterprise is adopting the web, mobile, and cloud, and directly selling to the consumer, it would be paramount that the IT team prioritizes the security of its product, and most importantly ingrain the best practices of weaving security into the development process.

Who better to don the mantle of defense than the ‘developer’? After all, when it comes to the security of an application, ‘developers’ are the first line of defense!

Defense-In-Depth

A ‘Defense-In-Depth’ approach to security for applications is a layered approach to security. What it essentially means, is that developers should take necessary action to mitigate security risks at every layer, be it the front-end (client), middle-tier, database services, or even the network layer. To do that, developers need to collaborate with various stakeholders: customers, DevOps teams, IT-networking, and the security teams handling the necessary infrastructure.

A developer has to have the same approach while developing secure applications using a low-code platform. WaveMaker comes fortified with SAST tested auto-generated code that is Veracode^TM verified. While developers working with WaveMaker can rest assured of the inherent security of the platform, there are a few best practices that a one can follow while using WaveMaker low-code to develop secure applications.

Embed security using WaveMaker

Developers need to think about security primarily in three areas: Data, Business Logic, and Coding. Data in itself could be static or could be in transmission. Depending on its state, the developer needs to keep an eye out for the following checkpoints:

Data at Rest:

• Ensure that no personally identifiable information is stored at the client-side (in-cache of web application or in device storage of a mobile application)
• For mobile applications, store relevant and critical information in secure elements
• Avoid storing information such as service credentials and connection strings in an accessible file. If stored, ensure that there is a proper authentication and authorization mechanism in place to access these files
• If possible, use rooted/jailbreaking detection for mobile apps.
  Cordova provides plugins for the same. This can be added to the application by importing the plugin to the application. Plugins can be imported as described here.

Data in Motion:

Secure data in motion from being intercepted

• Use HTTPS for all calls between the client and the server-side
• Use TLSv1.2
• Ensure that the data between client and server-side is encrypted
• Use updated security certificates that have the latest and secure cipher algorithms
• Ensure validity of certificates. In case, certificate pinning is used on mobile applications ensure that certificates are renewed before expiry and app uploaded to app/play store to avoid apps breaking in production
• Protect API calls with authentication
• Do not include PII data as a part of a GET call

Business Logic:

• Use multi-factor authentication
• Have a password policy and validation
• Include input validation as a part of data length, type, and white-listed characters
• Do not include passwords as a part of the ‘Remember Me’ functionality
• Do not provide the reason for the failure of authentication in event of a validation failure

Coding Best practices :

• Do not log sensitive information like passwords
• Include all loggings as a part of the ‘isDebugEnabled’ flag so that they can be disabled in the production
• If ‘Request’ and ‘Response’ are logged or can be logged in debug mode then create filters for sensitive data
• Use the latest versions of third-party plugins that are imported into the application
• Use the latest SDKs/APIs that are tested against vulnerabilities
• Flush out session data during logout
• Error stack trace should not have sensitive information. It is always advisable to add custom messages as error messages rather than simply passing or printing the error stack trace which may have application class/file names or sensitive data.
• WaveMaker is Veracode^TM certified and the auto-generated code is protected against OWASP Top 10 security risks. However, while designing an application the developer should keep these risks in mind and design the application to safeguard it against them (For a greater list of guidelines, follow this OWASP cheat sheet]
• When using WaveMaker low-code platform, ensure that Veracode^TM-like scans are performed for both JavaScript and Java code

Security is an inarguable conclusion

While security best practices can help developers immensely, what is more important, is that they develop a ‘security mindset’. Security must be a priority and not an afterthought. While developing applications using ‘Agile Practices’, security should be a criterion in the ‘Definition of Done’ of user stories. Bigger pieces should be taken up as enabler stories. Regular penetration tests should be performed early in the development stage and should be a part of every sprint release. A security loophole caught early in the game will alleviate future pain points, bring down costs and reduce technical debt.

Being secure is not an option, it is an inarguable conclusion. Developers with a finer sense of security will hold this as their mantra.

Author’s Bio

Gopi is a software architect with over 15 years of experience in the financial tech and IT domain including 9 years he spent on mastering mobile architecture design. He presently leads a team of low-code developers and mentors them about best practices in software development. In his free time, he loves to read non-fiction, watch history channels or binge-watch movies.
Write to Gopi Mishra at info@wavemaker.com

Authored by Akhil Pillai, Principal Engineer, WaveMaker, Inc

The web has been a unique platform to develop applications for decades. Of late, platform-specific applications have created a lot of buzz, mainly owing to their reliability and extensive features. Some of them work offline, some have hardware capabilities while some of them can notify users of important updates. PWAs or Progressive Web Applications are the web’s newest attempt at matching the level of reliability and richness that these native applications offer.

What exactly are Progressive Web Applications?

Progressive Web Apps are just plain old web applications with newer capabilities enabled on modern browsers using progressive enhancement. That is, even if the modern features are not supported by the browser, the user still gets the core experience of a web app. PWAs make use of web-platform features like service workers and manifests to give users an experience on par with native apps.

Some of the features that PWAs offer are:

Installable

PWAs allow users to install them through prompts that are either on the browser or implemented by the developer. Once installed, they mimic native apps that are available on home screens, docks, or taskbars. The application opens up as a different window rather than as a tab in a browser and is shown as part of the app switcher, thus tightly integrating it with the platform.

Reliable

Speed is crucial to keep the user interested and reduce bounce rates. Google's research shows that an increase in page load times from 1 to 10 seconds leads to a 123% increase in bounce rates. The capability of PWAs to cache resources and load them from the cache greatly increases speed and performance. This not only helps with load times but also helps when the network is slow or there is no network at all. This means even when offline you have access to your favorite application unless network connections are indispensable.

Linkable

Being a web application, PWAs can be easily shared using URLs. Anybody with a URL can install a PWA on any platform with a supported browser. This greatly reduces the effort it takes to distribute an app through an app store. Managing versions are made easy too with auto-updates or prompted updates that allow partial updates. With this feature, gone are the days when we had to download entire applications for just a small change in text.

Enables Notifications

One of the biggest flexes that native applications had over web applications is the ability to push updates to the user. Though web applications could show notifications, they needed to be running in a window to do so. PWAs have overcome this hurdle through service workers. A service worker is a piece of code that runs in the background even after the web application is closed by the user. This allows the web application to run background tasks and receive notifications. This makes it easy to keep the user engaged even when the application is not running.

Secure

PWAs are inherently secure. The service worker, which is the core part of a PWA, is only activated if the connection is secure. If the connection is not established over a secure HTTPS protocol, PWAs behave just like normal web applications.

Though these are some of the main features that PWAs offer, there is much more to them like background sync and hardware communication among others.

How can PWAs impact business?

Most of the features directly or indirectly affect the way users interact with web applications. This in turn drives business decisions. For example, giving a native feel to a web application is made easier with PWA. This allows businesses to ship applications faster while skipping app stores and their complex policies. PWAs while reducing development effort also reduce the associated development cost. Faster loading times give a big boost to customer retention while notification capabilities keep the user engaged.

In terms of data supporting these tall claims, let's take the case of Twitter. Twitter saw a 65% increase in pages per session, 75% more Tweets, and a 20% decrease in bounce rate. Nikkei saw 2.3 times more organic traffic, 58% more subscriptions, and 49% more daily active users. Hulu replaced their platform-specific desktop experience with a Progressive Web App and saw a 27% increase in return visits. As they say, numbers don't lie. PWAs are definitely influencing customer interaction with applications.

How can WaveMaker help?

PWAs combine the native feel of platform-specific applications with the dynamic nature of web applications. But how do we implement all these features? Using vanilla JavaScript and HTML to implement such rich features would take a lot of time and effort. Of course, libraries like Angular and Workbox can help but WaveMaker goes a step further. With the latest 10.9 release, PWA is officially in its beta stage on WaveMaker. All the user has to do is enable an ‘app.pwa.enabled' flag in the profile they use for production. Detailed instructions can be found here.

WaveMaker uses Angular’s built-in support for PWA and throws in a bit of its own magic to enable these features. As soon as the flag is enabled, two of the most prominent features are baked right into the WaveMaker web applications - installability and caching. Notifications are also enabled by default that can be made to work with a few app-specific changes. WaveMaker also allows the user to choose a custom icon for the installable app. What better than having your brand image in your user’s app drawer!

At WaveMaker we realize that continuous improvement and innovation is the path to creating customer satisfaction. As of now, PWA features that are in the beta stage are subject to continuous improvement. The way forward is to enhance features like notifications and to gradually add features dictated by customer interests.

PWAs are here to stay and WaveMaker will help your business embrace the technology with as little code as possible.

Watch this video to know more.

Author’s Bio

Akhil Pillai is a full-stack developer with more than 10 years of experience in software development. He is a technology enthusiast and a polyglot with a soft spot for machine learning. In his free time, he loves to read technical content and listen to music.

Low-code is high on learning: A developer’s perspective

Mankind and the systems that it relies on are in a constant state of flux. From the transportation systems we travel in, to the medicines we take, evolution has been a constant phenomenon in human life. If that were not so, we would still be stuck in stone-age. Development tools are no different. From low-level languages like COBOL to high-level languages like Java and Python, coding has evolved to make application development easy. Similarly, IDEs are constantly evolving to make the developer’s life easy. From text editors to GUI-based IDEs to IDEs that even autocomplete your code, development environments have come a long way. Low-code is the next eventual milestone.

Hi! I am Sagar Vemala, from Hyderabad, India and I work for WaveMaker, Inc. After completing my engineering course, I joined WaveMaker as an intern where I was introduced to low-code development and I found the concept of converting ideas into products rapidly; absolutely fascinating! I had an offer in hand to join a reputed technology company as a developer even before I was offered an internship at WaveMaker, but I must say that the internship introduced me to a whole new world of application development and I decided to stay. When I started as a full-time developer at WaveMaker, I was warned by my peers about being labeled as a ‘low-code developer’ but my gut instincts told me that I was making the right decision. Looking back, am glad I stuck to my decision. A low-code developer’s job is not restricted to simple coding, it is an expansive sea of learning, of thinking outside the box and more importantly, it is a job that solves a problem.

In this context, I would like to share my experiences from my journey, clear some misconceptions and present my point of view about my career as a low-code developer. Here are a few pertinent questions that I get asked about low-code:

If it is just drag and drop, then what is there for a developer to do?

I learned Java on notepad++. While it is the best way to learn Java, it is not necessarily the best way to develop faster. Seeing me code on a text editor, my friend introduced my novice self to the Eclipse IDE and it is there that I was introduced to the world of GUI IDEs with cool features like generating import statements, getters, and setters methods automatically.

My ‘world of coding’ just became so much more flexible.

The first time I saw how WaveMaker worked, it was déjà vu--Once again a complicated process had been made so much easier. My life as a developer is made ‘easier’ by WaveMaker. Here is how:

WaveMaker has a real code-behind approach and allows full customization and extension on every level. I consider WaveMaker as an advanced IDE (RAD) which generates open standards-based code following best architectural practices. It offloads monotonous tasks like setting up the project and environment, managing framework, and library upgrades and allows me to focus on the problem at hand. Also, it helps developers by providing configurational code for standard features like multi-language support, security, and scalability. With all that being taken care of by WaveMaker, I can focus on areas where my knowledge and experience are needed, like solving requirements and writing business and integration logic.

By being a low-code developer, am I restricting my learning and knowledge?

Absolutely not! I see myself as a problem solver and not just as a developer. I get to work on so many layers of technologies, right from designing the DB schema to preparing the backend to composing the UI and deploying the app.

In a traditional setup, this would require a large team of dedicated backend and front-end developers working for months to build an app. In today’s world, there is an imminent danger of irrelevance by the time an app is developed. With WaveMaker, a small team does the job in weeks that would traditionally take months and as a plus, I get to dip my toes in every kind of technology.

As development became more agile and the time frame became shorter, I got to work on many applications across different domains. At times, I would digest requirements directly from the client. With total control over development at all layers, I was able to provide accurate estimates. After observing diverse apps getting built, I started to think about another important aspect of development--user experience. This skill that I picked up while using low-code helped me deliver applications even without the help of a business analyst or a user interaction designer. My learning outside just coding, sky-rocketed.

I also got the opportunity to work with DBAs, senior developers, technical team leads, and architects of various enterprises as a WaveMaker SME. All apprehensions about not being ‘technical enough' disappeared after my conversations with them and I believe that I was able to add value to decisions that are agnostic of WaveMaker.

In a nutshell, the horizon of my learning expanded.

If the platform generates most of the code, won't that make developer's learning gloomy and less interesting?

Circling back to the point of learning, let’s elucidate with an example. Let’s say, a ‘traditional’ JavaScript developer has just started learning Angular. If the said person follows the documentation of a ‘to-do’ app and merely replicates the steps without understanding the intricacies of how Angular is helping, will the person be able to actually ‘learn’ and contribute to projects? No, right? The same logic applies here as well. There is learning in any sphere of creation. Developers who aspire to work with WaveMaker low-code need to use or will learn the below-mentioned skills to understand WaveMaker generated code and make the best use of it.

As a low-code developer, am I stuck? What is the future of a low-code developer?

I strongly believe that low-code may not be a hammer for every nail but is a necessary tool in the developer kit. Enterprises have and will adopt this methodology into their practices for years to come. Digital transformation has become ubiquitous with every enterprise and if an enterprise is looking at ways to create safe, scalable, and modern products with faster go-to-market, low-code is a safe bet. According to Gartner, the low-code development market is predicted to reach a worldwide total of $13.8 billion in 2021. In fact, the demand for low-code developers has been rising exponentially.

After having worked for WaveMaker for more than 5 years, I find myself with an abundance of choice and skills. I have the skills and knowledge to go the full-stack way, I can lead teams of low-code developers, I can be a solution architect, or I can choose to use low-code for hybrid development. There is a myriad of opportunities and options available. You only have to choose.

Finally, I think I chose the road less taken, even though opinions around me were not as positive about low-code, as they are today, I feel I made an interesting choice that fueled a unique career for me, and that has made all the difference.

Author’s Bio

Sagar Vemala has been with WaveMaker since 2015 and has implemented several customer projects as part of the professional services team. He has built a variety of API-driven applications in workforce planning, inventory management, finance and insurance. If you are developing an application and plan to use low-code, Sagar can share best practices using WaveMaker. Write to him at info@wavemaker.com

Tech-savvy users are swiping left aggressively and swiping right selectively. No, we are not talking about dating apps. We are talking about how quickly the customers of today are changing their banking preferences. Loyalty is a fickle emotion. As Jeffrey Gitomer says “You don't earn loyalty in a day. You earn loyalty day-by-day", by responding to the customer's needs every single day. Otherwise, they just move on.

How responsive banks are to the changing needs of the customer will now decide their longevity. Or else, it’s a swipe left for sure.

With so much at stake, what can banks do to retain their customer’s loyalty?

Going digital is an obvious answer, but then everyone is doing it. Every bank of repute has a digital face--some, more advanced than others. What spruces up the relationship between the customer and the banking app is the customer journey. It is all about how the relationship started and how it sustains--the qualities that keep the customer engaged, the features that make a banking app sticky. So what are the features in a banking application that entices customers, and how does the WaveMaker low-code platform help?

• Intuitive interfaces
  Clean and intuitive interfaces that keep screens simple but engaging to use, top-grade UI widgets that help create this clean look should be integrated into the low-code platform that aids this kind of interaction. WaveMaker has a plethora of widgets with diverse themes and styles that can be further customized per customer needs.
• Account information at a glance
  Accessing account information need not be a cumbersome process involving multiple authentications. Modern banking systems allow their customers to view their account information with just Touch ID or Face ID without having to log in using a password. WaveMaker low-code allows developers to interface with external biometric components by providing customized abstractions over the APIs.
• Corporate and Personal bank accounts management
  A single app should be able to handle multiple associated accounts, link to third-party offers, offer rewards like cash backs, and provide intelligent and relevant offers. The WaveMaker low-code platform allows the creation of prefabs or reusable software components customized to the banks’ requirements enabling composable banking and bringing in value addition to the application.
• Virtual smart cards management
  Physical credit cards are passe. Virtual cards are in. Modern banking apps allow the creation of virtual cards within the application within minutes. Customers can transfer funds in and out of the cards and perform transactions all within the context of the application. Virtual card management prefabs within the WaveMaker low-code platform allow developers to just pull in the prefab and customize it according to their requirements with just a few changes.
• Visualization of data
  Customers should be able to see their information in one place. It is not just what information they see but what inferences that they can draw--spend analysis, expense management, ways to improve credit score--a real-time visual dashboard. WaveMaker facilitates these visualizations where developers can access data from all modern data sources and integrate them with relevant UI abstractions with just a few steps.
• And……….
  Interlinked payment gateways, QR code scanners, OCRs, loan applications made easy, instant digital KYC, added conditional authentication, currency converters, instant loans, multi-device support, mobile photo bills, wearables and so on.

Though a banking application may not necessarily be composed of all of the above, it should at the very least be provided compatible platforms that enable the development of these features leading to the creation of a composable banking app. So the question one may ask is, does WaveMaker as a low-code platform support the integration of these features into a composable banking app?

The answer is a resounding yes!

A developer working on WaveMaker can take two approaches:

One, use the built-in prefabs to quickly conjure up a banking-specific component.
Two, integrate third-party banking components into the application.

This is helped by two factors:

• One that Wavemaker has an exhaustive repository of reusable components (also an evolving list of customizable banking components)
• Two, WaveMaker is an API-first development platform that allows the integration of third-party components easily

WaveMaker allows seamless collaboration of ecosystem partners with ease--the foundation of a composable banking architecture. It helps banks, BaaS players, fintech, and ISVs respond to what customers ask for--modern experiences, intuitive interfaces with stunning visual components, security, smooth onboarding, and device-agnostic feature-rich applications. WaveMaker with its API-first approach, prefabs, support for all major databases, and vault-like security with Veracode^TM certified code has all the qualities to broker a long-lasting partnership with the bank and the customer with agility.

Banks can expand the reuse of legacy core banking, offer services to brands as a BaaS player, or launch greenfield initiatives; with WaveMaker, the possibilities are endless.

So, this time when the user swipes right, banks can swipe right back at them!

Swipe right to know more about WaveMaker

*Watch this space for our next article on our banking software components

Team access to artifact repository, improved workflows for artifact publishing, prefabs versioning, and more

WaveMaker 10.8 brings capabilities and features that harness the power of artifacts and prefabs on the WaveMaker low-code platform--especially for teams. Prefabs are custom widgets that can be reused across projects within a team. With this release, the platform consolidates its strength on prebuilt software components by making collaboration across teams faster and easier to manage.

WaveMaker continues to enable enterprise IT teams, ISVs, and all stakeholders to co-create value faster and better with low-code.

Teams - Together and Transparent

Artifacts in Teams

Artifacts are reusable components that can be developed and maintained independently. Various components such as prefabs, project shells, template bundles, and themes come under the umbrella of artifacts on the WaveMaker low-code platform. V10.8 allows the sharing of a central repository of artifacts in teams promoting collaboration between team members.

Team members can view a list of all available artifacts providing clear visibility. Developers have complete access to the repository of available components and are free to choose the artifact version that suits their requirements best. This in turn makes activities such as documentation, maintaining change logs, and version control of artifacts a seamless process.

A new and improved flow

Artifact approval

With 10.8, developers creating and using artifacts across teams and projects can manage their workflows seamlessly. Consider a scenario where a developer publishes an artifact and waits for approval from the team admin. The admin can then review the artifact on the team portal and approve the same, making it accessible for all developers to use or reject it and send it back with changes.

Not just that, the same prefab or artifact can be versioned multiple times with each version visible to all team members. Developers can search and view available prefabs under projects, teams, or system prefabs and import specific versions into the projects.

One component, different forms

Support for specific prefab versions

Different projects can use different versions of the same prefab with a scope for upgrading. Developers can choose versions that suit their requirements with the help of changelogs and get real-time notifications of newer versions. Minor patch updates on prefabs can be published independently using branch support. Development teams can update patches and upgrades seamlessly without disrupting the existing environment and projects.

For ISVs, having access to the latest versions of artifacts is of great value. This allows for both forward and backward compatibility with respect to prefabs with minimum disruption. With every new update, WaveMaker continues to bring developers together, fostering collaboration, and helping them build powerful applications.

To know more about WaveMaker 10.8.0, please read the release notes here.

Try WaveMaker 10.8 today

Create, publish and consume APIs effortlessly with WaveMaker low-code platform

Digital transformation is no longer a buzzword. It has become a way of life for enterprises that want to stay in business. In the current post-pandemic era, business maturity is being evaluated in terms of digital maturity. The road to digital adoption has many emerging technologies in force but working silently behind the scenes and aiding this rapid acceleration, is the unseen ‘super glue’ of all business services - Application Programming Interfaces (API). Technically, APIs have been around for two decades at different levels of operability but it is only in recent years that there has been an explosion of sorts in the usage of APIs.

The demand for multichannel experiences and the everything-on-cloud approach has accelerated the use of APIs. Whether it be composable architecture or microservices, APIs enable the kind of business collaborations that were unheard of before. The partnering of transportation services with a bank, retail shops with payment apps, and banks offering investment opportunities, loans, currency transactions, and payment services on an e-commerce platform have all been made possible by the growth of APIs. Similarly, offloading certain business tasks to ecosystem partners and liberating internal services from silos has been fueled by the synergy between APIs.

API-driven development

API-driven development is the practice of designing and building the API contract first and then developing the application around the contract. Also, known as the API-first approach, this paradigm involves the front-end developers building mocks around APIs and creating refined end-user experiences. In parallel, the back-end developers implement the underlying logic of the APIs.

Dedicated test suites are created around these APIs and, in a way, they foster the idea of test-driven development. In an API lifecycle, the API Publisher designs and deploys the API whereas the API Consumer discovers and integrates the APIs. Each of these roles has multiple functions associated with them and those functions define the characteristics of the API.

API Management with WaveMaker low-code platform

WaveMaker is an open standards-based, developer-centric low-code platform built for modern development practices. The platform enables app developers to play the role of an API Publisher and API consumer. The platform has a natively integrated component called the API Designer which is used to ease the process of designing, creating, and consuming APIs.

• API- first approach: With WaveMaker, a REST API is generated automatically for every service that is imported. These APIs are available for consumption as well as modification through the API designer that can be used for:

1. Exploring the various APIs generated by the platform
2. Testing the APIs 
3. Customizing APIs generated by Java services

• API Generator: WaveMaker generates standards-based REST annotations for the above services which can be consumed by API tools for generating documentation using the API generator. The design of these auto-generated REST APIs can be updated further by configuring their description, visibility, method types, and parameter types.

• Open APIs: The platform generates core REST APIs endpoints using Swagger/Open API compliant contracts for database services, Java services, web services, custom code business logic, or even third-party imports. It also to generates UI functionality for Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) operations for REST APIs which conform to Open API specifications. Integrating an existing REST endpoint with any of the 100+ UI widgets offered by WaveMaker is also straightforward without writing a single line of code. Open API helps WaveMaker apps consume other WaveMaker APIs enabling applications within an enterprise to talk to each other.

• API Security & Testing: Security is auto-enabled for an application that can be viewed in the API designer. API security is ensured by securing it with role-based access within the enterprise. API endpoints are also OAuth protected. Once the REST APIs are defined successfully, they can be tested with the “Test” tab. On successful testing, APIs are published along with the applications.

• Legacy APIs: APIs are invariably REST-based but there remain big remnants of legacy SOAP-based APIs. WaveMaker automatically creates a REST API endpoint for the SOAP services that are imported into an application thus enabling the reuse and modernization of legacy technologies.

WaveMaker offers an API-driven development platform with:

• On-premise/dedicated API management platform
• Rapid delivery of APIS through auto-generation for databases, services, and legacy services
• UI abstraction over APIs
• OAS 2.0 compliance
• Flexible API publishing
• Fine-grained API control using policy templates
• Robust API security using OAuth
• Ability to modernize legacy applications by using SOAP APIs

A developer-friendly low-code platform abstracts the complexities of API management and provides UI-based connectors to work on the endpoints without having to hand-code. WaveMaker scores high on effortless API creation and management with an API-driven approach and an in-built API designer. The platform’s inbuilt adherence to the rules of the API game and its innate ability to convert any service as an API makes the job of all stakeholders so much easier.

APIs have become an inherent part of software building. Programmableweb (API directory) had a listing of mere 54 APIs in 2005. Today there are close to 24000 APIs listed there, and this is excluding the internal enterprise-level APIs and the ones that haven’t been made discoverable yet. Fuelling this expansion are tools and platforms that help us design, manage, test, produce, and consume APIs. Rapidly, easily and securely.

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As web application development evolved, usage of JavaScript skyrocketed. To address the variance in support of JavaScript, HTML across the different browser versions libraries like jQuery evolved to offer a layer of abstraction for the web developers, so that they can just focus on writing their application logic instead of worrying about the vagaries of browser support. Single-page web applications started to become the norm as more code started to be written in JavaScript than ever before. JavaScript has also become the language of choice to deliver applications that run on desktop browsers and mobile phones. So web applications written in JavaScript are now in the run-in environments with huge variations in parameters such as device CPU & memory, network bandwidth, browser support.

Powering this scale of growth needed the emergence of more JavaScript frameworks that provide abstractions over this diversity of hosting environments packaging up the best practices in loading times, memory usage, and responsiveness. There is simply no way to deliver a high-quality user experience without basing application development on top of these quickly evolving JavaScript frameworks such as Angular. Leave it to the smart folks in the Angular team to worry about keeping up with the evolving web application requirements while the application developers’ energies are productively engaged with solving the business problem at hand.

WaveMaker generates Angular code

WaveMaker is the only Rapid application development platform with open-standards-based code generation using Angular & Spring. Our 110+ UI components are implemented as Angular components built into libraries. When the user starts building a page in WaveMaker, the product starts generating Angular code in the background. The generated code imports the UI components user dropped into the page and then wires them up using data binding.

The code generated by WaveMaker is fully customizable, allowing developers to write custom business logic in javascript. Using WaveMaker our customers have built a line of business apps, customer-facing portals, and mobile applications in several verticals such as insurance, banking, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, etc.

Build full-stack teams and boost their productivity

WaveMaker offers ready to use and well-tested component library and a visual development environment to drag-n-drop these components to design a page. WaveMaker abstracts away all the Angular concepts like routing, scoping, security (auth guards), i18n, and service integration with REST, SOAP & databases, etc. The developer focuses on building application capabilities like user interface & interaction, representing data with widgets like Forms, Table, Lists or Charts, etc., defining access control for both UI components and APIs.

Mobile-First application development

WaveMaker UI components built using Angular are device responsive and designed to suit mobile-first apps. WaveMaker platform enables hybrid mobile application development, using device-native capabilities through Cordova combined with the power of responsive Angular widgets.

Bring in existing UI components

While WaveMaker has 110+ UI components and this list is ever-growing, we realize that teams may want to build reusable UI components to further decrease the time it takes to build applications in WaveMaker. WaveMaker supports importing reusable JavaScript components that are packaged as Angular.io elements, web components, or jQuery widgets. Using a WaveMaker feature called “prefabs” existing UI components can be imported and these will stay accessible alongside the standard WaveMaker UI components and can be easily dragged and dropped onto the page that is getting developed.

Keep your application on the latest version of Angular

When users develop an app, WaveMaker generates application metadata that does not depend on a specific Angular version. From the metadata the Angular code is generated by the platform, keeping the app agnostic of any specific version of Angular. This means that the app will stay using the latest versions of Angular as WaveMaker rolls out the support for those versions. By simply upgrading WaveMaker versions the application will start reaping the benefits of staying on the latest version of Angular. There is no need to spend time in big stack upgrade projects that consume the productivity of your team.

Build applications that load faster

One of the benefits of Angular is that the framework comes with tools that support very advanced build strategies that reduce your application’s footprint. This is very important to the application's load time as the amount of JavaScript that is getting downloaded from the cloud uses up critical resources such as network bandwidth, device CPU. Smaller the application footprint, the faster the app loads. When you attempt to deploy the WaveMaker app, we internally use ng build --prod mode with tree shaking enabled so that each page includes only the WaveMaker UI components that it uses and not all of the library. Essentially, the WaveMaker platform takes care of all the build optimizations and keeps the application footprint as optimal as possible to give better performance and first-time load experience.

Easy to deploy onto a CDN

WaveMaker builds which are triggered when the Deploy button is clicked can produce different bundles for frontend, backend code enabling the frontend code to be deployed on a CDN. Each of the resources the page depends on includes a fingerprint that represents the contents of the resource. This means that CDN that is serving static assets can be configured to set cache headers allowing browsers to cache the content and further optimizing the load times for returning users. Because of the content-based fingerprinting incremental releases of the WaveMaker application will only link to newer static assets if there was a change. In most cases, WaveMaker UI components for a page are already in the browser’s cache.

Docker and container technology are well-known in Enterprise today. The simplified view of containers as miniaturization of VMs seems to yield benefits of portability and faster startup times. But what is less apparent is the benefit they bring to the business. To understand this, we must first look at various scenarios in which the technology can be applied. Just as Java technology applied to IoT or Android is different from that applied to Enterprise software, the benefits realized from any technology, along with its challenges, vary depending upon the context of its application.

In this post, we'll explore a couple of contexts in which container technology can be applied and how its benefits and challenges differ.

Containers for infrastructure optimization

This is the most common context. Here, containers are adopted by IT as a form of software packaging and distribution. Typically, IT expects to be provided with containers instead of application binaries by the development teams. So containers act as a sort of black box that contains all the software and its dependencies. Developers require to package and deliver a set of container images along with relevant configuration files--that describe how these containers may talk to each other (ports), what storage needs they have (volumes), and so on. From an IT stand-point this creates a homogenous black-box approach to deploying pretty much anything in the Enterprise, and this makes it especially suited to large, data-center scale deployments.

In this condition, the application and adoption of container technology is largely IT-oriented. It favours IT over developers as the latter need to do a lot of heavy-lifting--converting their app binaries and dependencies into container images and pushing them into a container registry. Most container management platforms out there focus on providing the right tools to IT to pull those images from a registry and provision them on a set of machines (physical or virtual). The focus of such platforms is purely on run-time aspects, such as container orchestration, with very little context of the app or the app stack itself.

The key benefit of approaching container technology in this context is the optimization of infrastructure resources. Platforms like Kubernetes were born out of such a need to optimize infrastructure usage at very large scales (say, millions of containers). However, there are two points of caution. One, this may result in further isolation between IT and developers causing more throw-the-problem-over-the-wall scenarios. No matter how perfect the technology, experience tells us that more de-siloed communication and collaboration is the approach towards hassle-free and rapid delivery of applications in production. Hence, “DevOps”. Two, it is questionable whether all applications are suited to such a black-box hands-off approach between developers and IT. Also, the effectiveness of this approach in real usage remains to be seen.

Containers for rapid application delivery

In this case, application delivery teams adopt containers with the primary goal of speeding up the time-to-market for their apps or products. Using the rapid portability advantages of containers, development and DevOps engineers put together the app composition, wire together various services/ micro-services--by use of service discovery--and set up configurations for various environments. This context of container usage is more app-focused and less infrastructure-focused (though the resource optimization benefits of containers accrue over time as more apps adopt containers for delivery). Also, the approach is both design-time and run-time focused and favors the development and DevOps teams over IT. It seeks to make development teams self-sufficient in getting their apps into the hands of their users.

Few platforms focus on these aspects that provide developers the required tools to automate the generation of container images, service versioning, and configuration for multiple environments of the app. The most important benefits of such platforms are rapid containerization of existing apps, rapid provisioning and configuration, and easy promotion of apps from one environment to another. Orchestration takes care of scalability and high-availability requirements, and these are configured entirely from an application perspective.

The greatest benefit for enterprises using containers for rapid application delivery is time-to-market for their apps rather than infrastructure optimization. As the market for containers matures further, expect to see a shift in focus towards this direction.

Introducing WaveMaker HyScale

Wavemaker HyScale is app containerization and container management platform that takes the view that an application’s time-to-market is a far more important focus for Enterprise business than infra-resource optimization. The platform is built ground-up with the application in mind and every aspect is designed around the app's stack, the app's services, and the app's configuration. Hence there are very few (if any) aspects of the platform that require users to deal with the underlying container technology aspects. In fact, HyScale makes it very easy for users to adopt the platform--and thereby adopt containers--without even requiring to know Docker, or use any Docker commands or even any kind of build/ deploy YAML configuration files.

HyScale allows development teams to stay focused on the app and become self-servicing at the same time, allowing them to rapidly deploy and iterate over their app.

Contact us to know more about how WaveMaker HyScale can empower your organization to achieve faster time-to-market with containers and without having to re-skill or re-tool you development workflows.