3 years to master the new technology, it is better to try this low-code Rubik's Cube

Abstract: According to a survey conducted by IDC, it takes three years for a person to master a new technology. As for the entire manufacturing enterprise, facing so many new technologies, it may take longer. How can we solve this problem?

This article is shared from Huawei Cloud Community " Creation] Playing Rubik's Cube? Come and try the HUAWEI CLOUD application Rubik's Cube low-code platform! ", author: Qiming.

Why is cutting-edge technology and low-code development so popular?

International practice, let us first introduce the concept of "low-code development": Low-Code Development Platform (LCDP) is a development platform that can quickly generate applications without coding (zero code) or with a small amount of code. The method of application development through visualization allows developers with different levels of experience to create web pages and mobile applications through graphical user interfaces, using drag-and-drop components and model-driven logic.

From its introduction, we can find that its popularity is actually an inevitable thing.

The trend of enterprise digitization is obvious. No matter which industry you are in, the current "hot news" of enterprises is all about digital transformation. From the 2018 Gartner CEO survey shown in the figure below, 42% of CEOs believe that digitalization is the core of the company or advocate a digital priority strategy, and more than half of the CEOs plan to increase IT investment in 2019.

Behind the prevalence of low code in the digital age, there are some problems faced by enterprises in the process of digital transformation. Take the manufacturing industry as an example. Manufacturing companies have a long history of development. "Traditional" and "complex" are its characteristics, but the Industrial Internet is imperative. So when the IT environment and social environment of manufacturing companies are so complex, and the number and capabilities of these traditional companies cannot match the demands, how should we integrate some of our new technologies, such as 5G, big data, and the Internet of Things, into these? What about the business?

According to a survey conducted by IDC, it takes three years for a person to master a new technology. As for the entire manufacturing enterprise, facing so many new technologies, it may take longer. How can we solve this problem?

Low code concept: let mortals do extraordinary things

Perhaps the answer lies in a sentence of Peter Drucker: Companies will never have enough talented people... The key is to let mortals do extraordinary things!

Specifically, the only breakthrough point is to solve the contradiction between the number of talents and capabilities faced by enterprises that cannot match the emergence of new technologies, and the needs of rapid business transformation and business efficiency improvement. thing.

And this is the concept and idea hidden in the low-code design and development of Huawei Cloud AppCube. I don’t know if you have heard of a story about software engineers in "The Myth of Man-Moon" (wrote by FrederickP.Brooks.Jr.): A long time ago, there was a giant beast that accidentally fell into a tar pit. And God can only watch it struggle deeper and deeper in the tar pit, and finally die in the tar pit.

The software development is actually the same as the above story. Software development is a very complicated thing:

The current actual software development results are the red curve. The white curve is the workload of personnel. And the middle part is their gap. The complexity of the current software and business requirements are getting higher and higher, the changes are getting faster and faster, and the emergence of new technologies, etc., too many uncertain factors will lead to the generation of gaps.

The focus of the low-code development platform is to make the uncertainty factor into a certainty factor. It is the direction of HUAWEI CLOUD AppCube's unanimous efforts to let developers do simple things and leave the complexity to the platform.

The change of AppCube development model helps to quickly realize customized development of applications

With low-code development, the software development model will usher in greater changes. For example, when we are working on a project, we will customize and expand on the baseline, and the case by case will be completed, and the R&D staff will be miserable.

In the future, the development model will greatly change:

The baseline is divided into two parts, and the platform serves as the bottom support. As mentioned above, leave the complexity to the platform, establish the interface of the new technology on the platform, and encapsulate it; some templates and reproducible experience, we call it "assets."

With the increase of reproducible experience, the platform's ability to precipitate becomes stronger and stronger, the threshold for customization personnel will be greatly reduced, and the workload will be greatly reduced.

In this mode, we will have two parties:

One is the current software developers, focusing on the accumulation of reproducible experience, including the abstraction of business-level services, which can be made into corresponding microservices and put into the platform. Focus on business, process, design, etc. Based on this business design and process design, the core business or core processes and algorithms in the enterprise are realized.

The other party is the business staff. With the development of business, the demand for software personnel will increase. In this case, we abstracted this part of the simple problem, lowered the threshold of customized things, so that people who do not understand software development can do related customization work on the platform, so as to solve the problem of software productivity.

All in all, let people with strong software development capabilities focus on assets and platforms, and let business personnel do related customized development, and jointly complete the improvement of corporate efficiency and application development.

In the data age, Huawei Cloud AppCube helps enterprises develop minute-level applications

The advent of the data age brings dividends to many enterprise developers, but also challenges them, especially enterprise application developers, such as long development time, low reusability, and non-standard industry standards, etc. And other problems.

In response to the above-mentioned problems in the current enterprise digitalization process, or the difficulties in enterprise application development and replication, Huawei has done a considerable amount of time in this regard, and is based on its own application development experience and technical accumulation , Launched a low-code development platform called App Cube.

As its name implies, "Magic Cube" means that application development can develop applications with different scenarios, different complexity and different requirements, like playing a Rubik's Cube. Its main ability is to solve the application development problems of 5 different industries within 10 minutes. How do you do it? Let's explain in detail next!

Introduction of several application templates

In terms of software applications, from the beginning of development, 0~1 development, and 0~1 development, there are many ways to copy 1 to N in the industry, and HUAWEI CLOUD has accumulated a lot in the AppCube code development platform. Industry template. Through these application templates, enterprise developers can quickly develop applications or directly develop their own applications based on templates that have completed 0~1 application development.

Let's demonstrate the powerful functions of AppCube through actual operation!

As mentioned above, we have quite a lot of related application templates, we can start with application templates. First of all, we will give you a brief introduction to the templates of these existing industry applications.

Light application template: equipment maintenance management application development

The equipment maintenance management system is the practice of equipment maintenance application from the enterprise. For example, the air conditioners in some parks are broken, or some other equipment is broken, and they are facing maintenance. Generally, the customer who encounters this problem calls the customer service staff; after receiving it, the customer service staff creates a repair work order; the repair work order will be dispatched to the engineer soon, and the engineer will record the overall repair situation after the repair is completed. Carry out a closed loop and give feedback to the final customer through customer service staff. The above is the application scenario of equipment maintenance, as shown in the figure below:

Industry application template: Smart smoke application development

The smart smoke detector is based on a smart smoke detector fire-fighting system in a park. Smart Smoke Sense provides facility management, alarm analysis, and warning and early warning related to common fire safety applications. In key fire prevention areas, such as gas stations, chemical plants, etc., after installing equipment such as smoke detectors and cameras, the equipment connects to the IoT device management platform to report smoke concentration and other data in real time.

The smart smoke sensor application accesses the device data reported by the IoT device management platform, monitors the device data changes and performs processing and analysis, and then reports alarms for data exceeding the threshold.

The specific scenarios of Smart Smoke Sense mainly include the following points:

1. Devices such as smoke detectors and cameras need to be managed on the "smart smoke detector" application side, such as adding devices, deleting devices, setting device alarm triggers, etc.

2. Report device data. For example, smoke detectors will sense the smoke concentration in the surrounding environment in real time and report the smoke value to the IoT device management platform.

3. The "Smart Smoke Sense" application accesses the device data reported by the IoT device management platform, and performs processing and analysis, such as obtaining smoke values, querying related device data, and judging whether an alarm is generated, etc.

4. The "Smart Smoke Sense" application displays alarms on the front-end page, such as presenting the specific location of equipment alarms, alarm information, video surveillance, and related emergency linkage operations.

Light application template: questionnaire application development

A questionnaire is a set of questions related to products, social activities, etc., or a question form prepared for investigation, also known as a questionnaire. With the help of this questionnaire, investigators can make accurate and specific measurements on the product use process or social activity process, and apply sociological statistical methods for quantitative description and analysis to obtain the required survey data.

Scenario-based survey of the questionnaire application template The content of the questionnaire that the developer used to respond to the AppCube. Developers can modify this template and quickly customize the survey content for their own products.

In addition to the above-mentioned classic application templates, there are also light application templates for the epidemic, such as health check-in application development templates, and performance evaluation application development templates for performance approval.

Light application development practical operation exercise

After a simple introduction to the development and application template, we have a certain understanding of the Huawei Cloud AppCube low-code platform. Next, we will conduct a practical exercise to actually see how easy-to-use lightweight applications are developed based on the platform.

1. Log in to our HUAWEI CLOUD homepage ( https://www.huaweicloud.com/), log in or register, and perform real-name authentication

2. Enter the AppCube product service page ( https://www.huaweicloud.com/product/appcube.html), click "Use Now"

3. Enter the AppCube service page and click "Enter Development Environment"

4. Enter the development-oriented interactive interface of the low-code development platform

5. Take the application of Rubik's Cube to develop the "Equipment Maintenance Management" application as an example, click "Use Template"

6. Create a light application

7. After entering the development page, click "Preview" to see the preview effect

8. On this page, you can see some related functions, such as "add an air conditioning device". Click "Device Management"-"Device List"-"New Device" (on the right) to perform related operations

9. Fill in the relevant information and save to complete the new equipment operation:

10. At the same time, click "device monitoring" to get the device location

11. Assuming that this equipment fails, as a customer service staff, you can perform the task of adding a new work order in "Work Order Management"-"New Work Order"

12. Fill in the relevant content fields and save the submission

13. Click "My Work Order" to view the work order

14. Click "All Work Orders" and click "Dispatch Orders" to dispatch orders

15. As a maintenance engineer, you can click "Maintenance Treatment" to receive the work order and view the related details of the work order

16. Click "Process" to process the work order

17. After the repair is completed, click "Process" again to start the "close order" action

The above is a closed loop of work order maintenance, which can be easily completed on a low-code development platform.

At the same time, some fixed fields can be customized and customized. The path is:

Equipment--Page--customName1223edit

After entering the page, you can delete and modify according to your business needs, and click Save to directly generate a new application.

The above process can be easily completed within 2-3 minutes, realizing the real magical application development.

Customized modification of light application development process

In addition to the above-mentioned customized modification of the page, the overall flow can also be modified.

Click Equipment--Flow--customName to view the current application process

Or WorkOrder--Flow to modify

Industry application development practical exercises

For industry application development, actual operation and light application development are similar. Take the original template "Smart Smoke Sense" as an example,

Click "Use Template" to carry out related development based on the original template:

Also click on the small eyes of "Preview" to view the preview page:

From the preview effect, it can be seen that the application can monitor some devices in the park. If there is a fire in some place, the IoT device will monitor the location of the alarmed device and report the information name of the device. After the report is completed, the system will prompt the management staff, and the management staff can initiate related processing. The disposal process of the house.

Among them, multiple functions such as SMS sending, emergency warning, and picture components can also be realized. For the technical novice, its operation is also very "no brain". It can be said that within 10 minutes, a technical novice can also realize the creation of at least 5 industry applications. So how does the Huawei Cloud AppCube low-code development platform make it so easy to use?

Detailed explanation of the story behind AppCube

Definition: AppCube is a one-stop development and operation platform for all-cloud code writing, refactoring, compiling, testing, publishing, and going online.

Generally speaking, the application to be developed needs to include three parts (as shown in the figure above): data object, logical arrangement and page arrangement. After completing the development of related functions, the system will generate some logical text codes, which can be packaged and run on the base platform. On this basis, we can normally go online and run some of the corresponding applications we have seen on the base.

Simply put, AppCube is actually a program development environment and a program running platform.

In-depth research, we found that the underlying design architecture diagram of Huawei Cloud AppCube is as follows:

First, start the explanation from the red part in the middle. It can be seen that here, Huawei Cloud AppCube provides an "engine", which is used to execute some code packages of text logic generated by the above-mentioned orchestration. That is, the code package runs on the engine. And what we call the code package, we have also become "metadata".

In general, the design idea of Huawei Cloud AppCube is a low-code development platform driven by metadata.

Next, is the "integrated docking tool." AppCube provides tools for interfacing with third-party systems, such as IoT, video cloud, and other third-party systems.

In addition, it is the "operation and maintenance platform". The operation and maintenance platform can ensure the relatively robust operation of the third-party development platform, so that the corresponding procedures can be executed stably.

As a complete set, as a developer, you actually need to pay less attention. You only need to open a development account on HUAWEI CLOUD and subscribe to HUAWEI CLOUD AppCube to start your own development journey.

Introduction to the main industry applications of Huawei Cloud AppCube

So what are the core capabilities and features of the Huawei Cloud AppCube development platform?

As can be seen from the above figure, Huawei Cloud AppCube has five key capabilities:

zero code: supports developers to complete application development through drag-and-drop arrangement of interfaces and processes without developing code, so as to solve the contradiction between business personnel who do not understand technology and technical personnel who do not understand business. Quickly build enterprise applications;

low code: In addition to zero code, Huawei Cloud AppCube also provides low code capabilities. It is mainly for software development engineers. Software development engineers can realize the development of related applications based on the corresponding orchestration capabilities provided by the low-code platform and complex logic. Reduce the amount of code, do a lot of layout, you can build some complex application scenarios;

Multi-screen and Multi-terminal: For the applications developed in the previous two ways, the HUAWEI CLOUD AppCube can realize the release of different terminals: PC terminal and mobile terminal. At the same time, it also provides the ability to copy experience. Based on this ability, you can complete the development of 0 to 1 on the template that has been developed to solve the application of related scenarios. Developers customize or use directly based on template applications.

Asset Center: For example, some assets, including some components, interfaces, service processes and AP related can be reused. HUAWEI Cloud AppCube puts the reproducible experience in the asset center, allowing developers to get reusable things in the asset center.

Online development, one-click release: After the development in the development environment is completed, you can publish to the test environment and running environment with one click, realizing a one-stop publishing platform from development, testing, online, and operation and maintenance, thereby greatly improving development efficiency The promotion.

Based on zero-code development or low-code development, developers have developed applications for thousands of industries (smart parks, smart offices, smart cities, etc.), enabling developers to carry out agile development.

The more powerful function of Huawei Cloud AppCube is that, assuming that after the zero-code development is completed, some functions cannot be realized, and they can be handed over to the software development engineer for low-code development. Zero-code and low-code development are fully integrated.

Low-code development, extremely fast layout, cost reduction and efficiency increase

Next, we will focus on the "low code" function in the above 5 features.

interface layout: based on the interface layout function, which can realize the assembly of the building interface and the design of the graphical interface

business logic orchestration: can be logically arranged and designed on a low-code development platform. For example, to transfer an account to a bank, there needs to be an outbound and an inbound account, then at least balance must be carried out. Realize with logic orchestration.

data model construction: After implements business logic orchestration, relevant business data will be generated. You can save the data in the database. The design of the database, at the time of development, can be targeted for the design, construction and final data storage of the model.

BPM process scene-based orchestration: For some human intervention processes, such as the processing of various aspects of the approval flow, you can arrange and set related business processes based on the capabilities of BPM.

Based on the above four key capabilities, Huawei Cloud AppCube can support enterprises to quickly realize application development and optimization, which can save labor costs and improve enterprise operating efficiency.

Use technology to "beat" technical pain points, let's experience Huawei Cloud AppCube together~

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