Why open source is essential in a cloud era

As cloud continues to boom, it’s easy—but wrong—to assume that it may supplant open source. After all, much of the reason open source took off was that it enables developers to “get stuff done” without having to route requests for software licenses through Purchasing and Legal. Yet developers still had to figure out how to host and manage that software in their data center. With the advent of cloud, everything about running software becomes easier.

“In general, a low-code development platform offers a drag-and-drop designer, modules, forms, processes, workflows, data models, integrations, and one or more programming languages that you can use within the product. The development platform may emit a specification that an engine can use to create an app or emit a runnable app. The app may or may not interact with the platform’s back end.”

The idea is to remove as much programming as you can, but not altogether. This means that developers can build solutions fast but still can code around any limitations that the low-code platform has. For example, building an inventory process monitor using a low-code or no-code platform means leveraging their interface (drag and drop) instead of traditional coding. 

However, as you may have guessed, graphical interfaces that allow you to program by drawing diagrams will eventually run into something that they can’t do. You may have to drop down to some native coding to access a complex API to get at status data within the low-code application.

In other words, we can get most of the way there without programming code. However, some programming will be likely needed in most cases since this is the real world and all.