Companies today are facing a racing increase in the demand for software products: technology is getting everywhere, from ovens to buses and everything in between. Considering the amount of diverse technologies that go into one single software product, and the rising number of coding frameworks (each one with their own particular characteristics) available, it is safe to say that most companies have growing needs for IT professionals.
On top of that, one employee can’t master all technologies, but rather should specialize in one or two: this makes finding the right talent particularly complex for companies, since not only do they need many people for software development, but they also are searching for specific knowledge areas they need to cover, which makes selection processes even harder.
So how do enterprises go about this?
There are a couple of notorious options that cover these gaps in the market: in countries like Vietnam, developers have a lower cost-per-hour, and there is also the option of using Open Source Code, which is free of cost and facilitates an easier and faster development process. Many companies leverage these kind of opportunities to cover their simplest applications.
Another option are the infamous low-code tools: these have been around for the last 40 years, and experts are saying that now is the time to start investing in this kind of technologies.
Companies are using low-code tools to generate applications, since they are now at a mature stage and are very cheap for users. The enterprises that integrate these platforms into their workflow are getting high financial rounds and changing the way they develop software dramatically.
There are many low-code tools in the market, which provide different approaches: some applications are specifically conceived for a single use case (such as videogame development) and some others are more generic.
Between those generic tools, there are the ones that are meant for people who don’t have tech skills to create their own simple applications, and then the professional ones, which typically have a truer low-code approach and provide a specific workflow to accelerate software development and cover project needs. A videogame or a real-time critical system management application may not be buildable using these platforms, but they do deliver fast software development capabilities for applications that are not that specific.
Low-code development platforms have many advantages to them, such as a flatter learning curve and problem abstraction (they manage technology and deployment for you). Therefore, companies that invest in low-code tools end up needing less employees to create the same amount of applications, and it is also not necessary for them to have specific technology expertise: they may work from a business perspective and the platform will manage tech-related aspects like code generation, application deployment and execution.
As a big company wishing to step into the world of low-code, it may be thrilling not to know which one of these tools to go for: since the market is still emergent, it is quite hard to know what to look for or even how to evaluate the business impact of these platforms. Maybe they are very useful short-term yet they come with costly maintenance processes, or perhaps the maintenance side of them is outstanding but whenever the company is looking to abandon the platform, that represents a big issue. Indeed, most low-code tools come with a very strong vendor lock-in: they take a “bring in your business requirements and we’ll build the solution for you” approach, and then they create applications in their technologies and deploy them in their platforms, where everything is under control. This allows the platform to be simpler, since applications can only be created in one technology and deployed in a single environment, yet renders it impossible to sell to specific clients that are looking for customization.
At everis, we firmly believe adaption and customization are key, therefore our approach at Dedalow is to provide a platform that supports different technologies so the client can choose from them, and also to offer custom projects over it upon request to further suit each company’s needs.
We take low-code a step forward and enable multi-technology code generation in our platform: Dedalow does not just provide the application, but also its code (upon request) in a professional, readable and editable format, in any of the technologies Dedalow integrates. This is key for many companies, both for security reasons (code can be read and audited by humans) and technology policy matters (the fact that Dedalow delivers the code means there is no vendor lock-in: the company can leave the platform and not risk losing control over their applications at any time).
Apart from adaptability, there is another critical advantage from multi-technology code generation: once an application has been modeled inside Dedalow, technology migration is completely free of charge, since the only work to do is switching from one code generator to another in order to generate the corresponding code in the new technology. This means great cost reduction both economically and in time, since the investment is made only once for each application.
On top of that, we also offer multi-technology deployment: Dedalow provides a default platform (OpenShift on Azure), but it is possible to deploy in AWS or even your own internal platform upon request.
So how exactly can everis cad revolutionize your application development workflow?
There are many factors that go into one single software development project: requirements, interfaces, business logic, databases, testing processes… These are all detached from each other in conventional development projects, and it takes both time and effort to figure out how to handle and coordinate them all.
Dedalow provides a single platform where your company can store the information from every development project: we don’t just allow your employees to model a project to then go on to generate the code and deploy it, but we also bring an End2End perspective to improve your workflow. Requirements, interfaces, business logic, databases and testing processes can all be modeled inside Dedalow and are therefore connected, which means they can all be traced together and neither cohesion nor dispersion of information will no longer be an issue.
We also facilitate exporting the information inside Dedalow to other formats, so documents can be generated at the push of a button and immediately be ready to send to whoever must review them. This also works the other way around, where you may import a requirement document or an Excel sheet into the platform to then be able to work with its information in a model format inside Dedalow.
You may also generate project status documents directly from the platform, leveraging all the information and its connections.
All in all, Dedalow is not just a multi-technology code generation tool: it is also a multi-technology project information generation tool.
Lastly, since testing is integrated both into the development project and into the platform, you may develop multi-technology applications and carry out the corresponding tests directly from Dedalow.
To sum up, Dedalow provides a platform that allows developers to model every part of an application’s system (from requirements to tests) and have them all linked and centralized in one place, providing the option to generate project documentation and leverage data from existing documents, therefore revolutionizing the application development workflow as we used to know it.