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Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

oreilly.com

1–10 of 98 posts

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#2
The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#3

The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

Security engineers would not be a thing if it was easy to secure your app without them.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#5

The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

A lot of it will be pushed down the stack into infrastructure. Infrastructure typically tails software, so over the next decade I would expect to see shifts in the infrastructure to accommodate this.

For example, I think we'll start to see more fine-grained ACLs in databases combined with passthrough authentication from the webapp. So the nocode app is basically just a layout engine that passes a query and your Okta token (or whatever) to the database, which runs the query and filters out results you personally can't access, and then nocode app formats it (basically, in a naive implementation).

IT gets to maintain control of the ACLs, and permissions become seamlessly uniform across applications. Marketing doesn't have to talk to IT get to credentials for the database and talk about security, they just set up a new app and the database makes sure that users are allowed to access that data.

That will also cause a cottage industry of tools for managing those permissions to spring up.

I would keep a serious eye on Microsoft in this space. Active Directory + SQL Server gives them serious inroads into major companies for something like this. Sharepoint is also already in the same vein. If they bought out a nocode platform, replaced Sharepoint with it and integrated the ACLs for AD and SQL Server, they could have a really compelling product in this space. It would be a perfect add-on product for Office 365, and the billing is already set up for a lot of companies.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#6

The one thing I worry about is security. How do you make low code tools flexible enough to be powerful while retaining security? On the other hand, maybe for the use cases that are well supported, these tools could provide security by default instead of relying on individual engineers to get it right.

You end up with the crazy profile system of salesforce. And if you’re the platform winner, people get certifications for your low code platform.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#8
The thing I'm finding hard to get my head around is people who are arguing that various languages such as COBOL or Python are, or might be considered low code or no code.

To anyone who needs to hear this: if it's code based programming then it's not no-code or low-code - it's code.

Put more simply:

code != no-code

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#9
Let me tell you: no/low-code solutions can be just as hard as if not harder than actual code in some cases. One of the more difficult engineering solutions I have had to implement in my career was with a tool called Tasktop, which synchronizes different requirements analysis tools like Jira, Jama, GitHub Issues, etc. No actual code is involved (unless you need to add customization scripts), but you definitely want experienced engineers creating these integrations, as there are a great deal of software engineering concepts that need to be understood in order to understand and create successful integrations. So “democratization” of programming is misleading for low/no-code solutions, as non-programmers will quickly find themselves in trouble and eventually hand off the solution to a an actual software engineer.

Re: Low-Code and the Democratization of Programming

#10
post #7

All this posts miss the best low code environments of all time: Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Unfortunately these two never made it to Internet era in big time and we have greatly come down from 90s RAD movement.

Lotus Notes was the greatest no-code environment of all.

Far, far ahead of its time.

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