Next-generation codeless application development

      A couple of years ago Gartner Inc, the respected industry analysts, predicted that by 2014 ‘Citizen Developers’ would build at least 25 percent of new business applications. They said that this advance should both enable end users and free up IT resources. However, analysts warned that IT organizations that fail to capitalize on the opportunities that citizen development presents will find themselves unable to respond to rapidly changing market forces and customer preferences.

Gartner defines a citizen developer as a user operating outside of the scope of enterprise IT and its governance who creates new business applications for consumption by others either from scratch or by composition. We believe that codeless application development is the best way to achieve that.

"Future citizen-developed applications will leverage IT investments below the surface, allowing IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows," said Eric Knipp, senior research analyst at Gartner. "Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — a vast expanse of departmental and situational projects that have lain beneath the surface."

But there has been a major hold-up on the way to the empowerment of ‘citizen developers’. The problem has been that it has all been too difficult to achieve with traditional development methods: ordinary users are intimidated by the systems. Better technology is needed to lower the bar for becoming a developer so that new development is possible without complex programming and endless debugging. There have been several attempts at creating software to empower the ‘Citizen Developer’. The first-generation platforms like Wavemaker and Alpha5 are grid-based systems designed for converting existing databases into web applications.

clearString codeless application development software is a next-generation platform that subsumes the database to allow the application developer to work directly with inputs and display without worrying about database management – while at the same time allowing input and output to legacy systems for backwards compatibility. www.clearstring.com