Low-Code Platform – The Inevitable
Building apps from scratch are usually bound to specific rule and syntax of a certain language. In recent years, developing an apps have been so much easier and accessible for both non-programmers and enterprise sectors. They can be done without committing big engineering efforts, that is called the low-code development. In the recent years, each of the big three cloud providers have launched their own low-code platform. With these of investments, applications develop by non-developer staffs are no longer a pipe dream.
What exactly is Low-Code Platform?
Whether it is business users creating an app for themselves or simplifying the development process for coders by automating manual processes, low-code development makes it easier than ever to create flexible applications to get specific tasks done.
The Benefits of Low-Code Platform
Reduced Costs
With the ability to build more apps in less time, the costs will be reduced. Low-code development reduces the need for more developers, thus reducing hiring costs. This is good news as low-code development can help limited financial startup organization and companies to build apps to achieve their business goals and deliver customer experience in better ways. With the right low-code platform you can turn your organization to be more productive.
Higher Productivity
Low-code development allows application to be built in a much faster pace. What used to take months can be reduced to weeks or even days! With low-code development, we can eliminate time as the barrier to real innovation.
Here comes Microsoft Power Apps
Power Apps is a PaaS offering and a low code platform from Microsoft. It targets non-technical users for them to create, manage and share business apps on iOS, Android and Windows devices. Microsoft Power Apps have hundreds of data sources, using library of connectors such as Google Drive, SharePoint, MySql and more!
Power Apps: AI-powered assistance using natural language
Have you ever dreamt of developing an app where you could use plain language, rather than learning the specific syntax? That would be every developer’s wildest dream! Fret not, Microsoft is taking a huge step toward that dream.
During Microsoft Build keynote, Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, announced that they have fine-tuned one of the most advanced natural language AI models on the planet, which is known as OpenAI GPT-3, to automatically generate Power Fx (Power Fx is the language they use in Power Apps) formulas based on natural language input. Now you will be able to simply instruct Power Apps in plain language rather than their syntax. Moreover, a set of formulas will be presented along with the explanation of how they work. All you need is to simply select the formulas to apply the logic to your app.
| Natural language input | AI-generated code input |
|---|---|
| Show 10 orders that have “stroller’ in the product name and sort by purchase date with newest on the top | FirstN(Sort(Search(‘BC Orders’, “stroller”, “aib_productname”), “Purchase Date’, Descending) |
Let us look at this example:
No longer you need to dive into countless internet forums and discussions when you are stuck with a certain problem. Whenever you are developing an apps in Power Apps, you now have an AI model as your personal trainer, that has been trained with 175 billion parameters, that give suggestions to point you the right direction. Even more reasons to use Microsoft Power Apps now!
Written by Iqbal | The Cloud Dude (Intern)