More than three decades ago, the Rapid Application
Development platform known as Magic burst upon the scene and became immediately
popular as the PC revolution was in full force. Thousands of citizen developers
known as “magicians” working on DOS machines created applications quickly and
easily accessing ISAM databases and displaying results on green screen
monitors. By the mid-1990s, Magic had gone cross-platform and enterprise and
global. Its citizen developers had grown-up and were winning all the
international development competitions. Suddenly, big businesses started using
Magic too and the RAD tool phenomenon of the PC became a mainstay for creating
serious business applications that served millions of users and handled
billions of dollars in transactions on enterprise servers.
Magic extended its citizen developer approach to application
integration as well. Starting in 2003, business analysts could now use “Magic”
to connect third-party applications behind the scenes. This RAD approach to
application integration began saving companies millions of dollars as they
streamlined business processes, unified information and reduced processing
errors without hiring a team of point-to-point integration programmers to make
it happen.
It is with more than a little amusement then that the Magic
community observes the introduction of new “low code” platforms and "click not code" solutions designed to solve
a problem that has been largely solved for decades by what has always been
known as a “no code” platform. Gartner has invented a new term, “citizen
developer” to describe app developers who are basically users that create apps
using enterprise approved app platforms.
For enterprise IT departments considering introduction of
low code platforms, a good hard look at a no code platform might provide some
reassurance in the form of a proven alternative. The Magic xpa Application
Platform and the Magic xpi Integration Platform of today are marvels in terms
of their ability to simplify the complexity of underlying environments. Using
no code visual interfaces and table driven app creation techniques, a citizen
developer can make software and integrate software thanks to several common
virtues:
Metadata Driven
Development. Why write code to manipulate data when you can instead
implement visual business logic directly that creates metadata instructions that
can be run as an application? It’s called Magic for a reason: because something
special happens behind the curtain; you never see the hard work. You just ask
for what you want: “Abracadabra.”
Reusability and the
Right Degree of Granularity. Call them objects, components, models,
templates, subroutines or services, software that can called and reused by
other software is virtuous by reason of its efficiency. Magic’s platforms
provide deliver reusability as a core characteristic of their internal
architectures and design studio experiences. Apps and integration flows are
easily built by leveraging granular objects, components, models and so on. The
beauty of the platform is that the granularity of the objects is not so fine as
to require constant assembly or so course as to be constrained in their flexibility.
With just the right sized building blocks, you can create anything without the
effort of coding from scratch.
Event-Driven
Architecture. A revolution has occurred in the IT world from an old
batch-oriented approach to processing to new event-driven architectures with
real-time or near real-time asynchronous processing and simultaneous support
for long running processes. In a service-oriented world, the Magic platforms
deliver responsive, event-driven environments that allow business applications
to respond immediately to requests and changes.
In-Memory Computing.
Both Magic xpa and Magic xpi leverage in memory computing techniques through
the use of an In-Memory Data Grid. Leveraging virtual spaces of shared memory
and processing an active-active clustering occurs whereby performance and operational
integrity are fully optimized. Parallelism and redundancy results in elastic
scalability and high availability.
These metadata-driven, reusable, event-driven, in-memory
application and integration platforms are producing mission critical apps and
supporting business critical integration processes. A virtuous platform in the
hands of citizen developers can be a beautiful thing. With more than 30 years
of expanding use, constant improvement and real-world bullet-proofing, Magic
now provides the most advanced application and integration platforms for
citizen developers. Why low code when you can no code?
