Why do Developers prefer Low-Code over Visual Programming and Modeling?
Many platform vendors advertise "Visual Programming and Modeling" as one of the main benefits of their iPaaS offering. This "Point & Click" development can be quite appealing to business users or management teams, but based on our experience working with developers, visual programming has several drawbacks decision makers should consider in their selection criteria and evaluation:
- Visual programming helps to quick-launch or prototype development but often requires additional scripting and coding for custom logic.
- For complex integrations, visual programming generates complicated diagrams that become difficult to develop, maintain and support.
- Visual programming creates slow-code not suitable for mission critical integrations or real-time big data processing.
- Visual programming often creates "spaghetti-code" through its missing abstraction layer and as a result becomes difficult to scale or reuse.
- Visual programming often lacks support for testing and debugging and is therefore not well suited for mission critical systems.
- Platforms with visual programming often lack 100% parity between the diagram and the generated code (roundtrip) resulting in no support for refactoring.
- Visual programming typically creates a vendor lock-in that most utilities try to avoid.
For these reasons alone, we believe that Low-Code development is a better choice for mission critical integration solutions at utilities. Our Utilihive eiPaaS integration platform provides a Low-Code Development environment that helps utilities and partners:
- Develop new services and integrations quickly
- Deliver performant and scalable real-time data flows and big data integrations
- Re-use integrations and services
- Create high software quality as the Low-Code development can be integrated into your Devops process and CICD pipelines with automatic building and testing
- Continuously improve your implementations and integrations
