Our powerful No-code development platform allow end users and business analysts to generate robust working software solutions rapidly without writing code.
According to Gartner Research: ‘No-code software platforms will be used for 70% of all application development by 2025’
Versatile Edge – Metadata driven no-code development
Versatile Edge is a true no-code development platform. It is written in Smalltalk and uses the Gemstone OO database for persistency.
It runs on a GLASS Stack (Gemstone, Linux, Apache, Smalltalk and Seaside) and can be hosted in the cloud or self hosted according to your requirements.
Why is Metadata driven no-code Important?
Metadata is information about information, or data about data. It summarises basic information about data, making it easier to find and work with specific instances of data.
Metadata-driven no-code development platforms are important because they can:
- Improve productivity: Developers can create functionality faster than traditional coding.
- Improve agility: Metadata-driven approaches are flexible and adaptable, allowing for faster responses to change requests.
- Improve collaboration: Business users can create and manage metadata without coding skills, which improves communication between the IT department and business users.
- Improve change management: Metadata versioning allows for rapid change rollouts with the ability to quickly roll back changes.
- Improve scalability: Metadata-driven approaches are scalable, allowing businesses to add new data sources and data structures as needed.
- Improve maintenance: Metadata-driven approaches are easier to maintain than traditional approaches, as changes can be made by updating metadata rather than modifying code.
- Improve user experience: No-code and low-code platforms can automate data integration, allowing users to focus on extracting insights from data.
Metadata driven development reduces long term costs too
Metadata driven no-code development further offers the future proofing of your business. The effort invested into modelling your business to generate an application or suite of applications using our no-code development environment results in metadata. That metadata models your business, and the processes that define it. As the versatile edge platform evolves, to support new infrastructure requirements or deployment methods perhaps, the underlying metadata does not have to be modified. The cost of maintaining legacy code is all encapsulated within the no-code development platform itself, and is not passed down to the owners of the applications.
Model First no-code development platform
Many no code development platforms have evolved from a software house’s history of manufacturing similar applications over and over again. The same was true of Pinesoft for our Microsoft based lo-code development platforms and case toolkits. These platforms tend to be very good at producing solutions for a specific industry, but less versatile when they are asked to perform outside of their historical origin.
Versatile Edge is different. Very different indeed.
Classes – Model your business first
Instead of starting your design by dragging visual components into a designer, development of a Versatile Edge solution begins with the design of the classes that model your solution. These classes and the relationships between them are of the utmost importance, as they really do represent the problem you are trying to solve. Modelling the problem will give you a fast and scaleable solution that will evolve as your needs do.
This is the view of our Application Development environment, App Dev, from a browser, looking at the classes in a real deployed application, our RFID automated manufacturing process control app.
If this sounds like a steep learning curve, rest assured, we can use the tools to build you a scaleable, stable solution that can evolve with your needs, and we can do it in record time.
Views – Build your UI from your business Classes
Having built the classes that model your business and allow you to solve your specific problems, the views may be easily generated.
Adding Fields to a View
Here we show the App Dev view editor looking at a reuseable view called batchView. It’s model is a Class called Batch.
The currently selected part fo the view is highlighted in Yellow, and it’s parent in Red.
To add a new Field:
- Choose a ‘Source’: At any stage in any view you have the current Model (The object that is being investigated, which is an instance of a Class), and the always available global objects (Context, Application, User Site etc). Here we are looking at the Model, which is Batch from our RFID manufacturing automation app
- Choose a Feature: The ‘Feature’ dropdown is populated with all of the available features of the Batch. In this case Notes, a string attribute, is selected.
- Select a Type: The avilable types of field to represent the selected Feature are then available for adding. The visual representations of the field types are to allow a drag and drop addition.
- Click Add
Automatically generate views from Classes
The Versatile Edge no-code development environment also includes the ability to auto generate views directly from classes if required.
Clicking either the info or edit view button will create a read only or edit view which fully models that class:
No-Code Development Platform Example – A ToDo app
We will use a series of short videos to demonstrate the process of building a simple application from scratch using the Versatile Edge No-Code development platform. This simple application then get’s extended to show you a few of the capabilities of this powerful no-code platform.
First – Build the app and it’s base classes and views
The following 10 minute video shows the process of creating a small functional ‘To Do’ application from scratch.
Models interact directly with views in Versatile Edge
Versatile Edge is a model first no-code development platform by design and for performance and scaleability reasons. The realationships between the model (the classes) and the views (the UI) however area extremely tight.
We will introduce another class, a List, and show how it can be used to add a Priority feature to our ToDo application. The direct interaction between the Model (Classes) and the views representing the UI is highlighted here.
No-code applications that are Locale aware
All applications built with the Versatile Edge no-code development platform are capable of being fully localised. Our user model has a locale, and Translatables may be translated into any enabled language at will. The application will thus apply any translations present automatically to each user at login.
Select a language, and translate the Default strign to the new language.
Easy re-use and extensibility of system classes
The Versatile Edge no-code development environment comes with significant amounts of pre built classes that may be deployed ‘as is’ or extended to suit your unique requirements with out affecting any other users on your host. There are typically pre built user interfaces to support these pre built classes and blocks of functioanlity, allowing for very rapid development of real business solutions.
- Users
- Roles
- Permissions – application, system and client specific roles are supported
- Languages
- Nationalities
- Currencies
- Clients – you, the client deploying the software
- Folders – site and client specific storage locations
- Sites – used to model each of your physical locations
- Appliation – the actual running application
- Context – a user session in a browser
- Graphing
- Documents – the system incorporates a fully versionable document management system
- Many many more…
The list of system re-useable objects that are all client extendable is long and constantly expanding
Easy re-use of your views within any application
Any part of any view may be easily turned into a reuseable component within the Versatile Edge no-code development platform. Once a view has been made re-useable future modifications are just done to the re-useable view, and are reflected everywhere that it has been used.
This is a simple example of a re-useable view, showing the Batch (of Product) from our RFID automated manufacturing solution. This is it at development time:
And the same view at runtime, displaying a batch of product:
A short video demonstrating the ease and simplicity of Localising applications, and reusing both entire models and user views within our no-code development platform is here:
No-code development platforms Power
Our Versatile edge no-code development platform offers unparalleled power and extensibility.
Versatile Edge supports Inheritance
Versatile Edge is a true OO no-code development platform:
- It supports Inheritance
- Versatile edge objects are polymorphic
- Classes can be dynamically resolved and cast
Extend the development environment yourself
Since the App Dev no-code development environment is written in itself, it is itself just another VE AppDev app. As such it can be readily extended to add new tools or change the look and feel of it.
Easy extension of Base or System classes
The versatile Edge no-code development platform is developed on a GLASS stack. It thus has the power of the Smalltalk programming language and it’s rich base library of classes available to it. It is realatively easy to expose any of this capability through to the App Dev environment and the no-code developer.
Adding ‘asInteger’ feature to a String
As Integer is a native method on a string within Smalltalk. This video demonstrates how easy it is to publish that method for use by developers within the Versatile Edge no-code development platform.
Extending the Session Context with a nextInt: random number feature
Here we demonstrate how we can extend a base class, the Session Context, which represents a users session at a browser, to give it the capability of generating a randomised random number within an Integer range.
Contact us to know more
Whether you are interested in the power of versatile edge for your business, or just want us to use it to generate you robust, affordable, future proof software, just let us know.