The rise, popularisation and penetration of low-code software platforms and tools designed to bring templated, pre-architected and ready-to-integrate ease to the software development trade has been widespread in recent years. As the use of these shortcuts and accelerators continues to proliferate, do we really need front-end customer or user experience tooling as well?
As we know by now, low-code is not a question of no coding at all, because that’s drag-and-drop visual interface-based no-code. Low-code software tools sit firmly in the professional software engineer’s toolbox and - as Gandalf himself would remind us - although many exist in this world, like magic rings, they should all be used wisely.
As the low-code toolbox expands and the ‘me too’ low-code offerings spring up from the non-specialist vendors who all want a finger in this part of the software zeitgeist pie, should we be considering the importance of this approach for the user-facing front end of our apps?
Top-down trumps bottom-up
Now that enterprise software companies have to build so-called ‘bottom-up’ user-driven applications that work the way real world users want them to, the ‘top-down’ ways of the past where software vendors simply chugged out their take it or leave it roadmap plans of the past are slipping away.