Kathy Gibson reports from the Roboteur launch in Johannesburg – There’s a new buzzword in the IT industry: the low-code (or no-code) revolution will make it easier for developers to design and deploy applications, ensuring a quicker time to value for organisations.
This is closely related to the growing interest in robotic process automation (RPA), which ultimately seeks the same goals by automating tasks within the IT organisation and the business as a whole.
This is the word from Barry Buck, creator of Roboteur and SpacePencil’s Z1 low-code development framework.
He explains that low code development, practically, is wrapping your blocks of code that actually do stuff in a way that allows users to create the code data that connects and configures these blocks from a user interface, as opposed to a scripting language.
“Roboteur, the low code platform with an RPA focus, is built entirely on the Z1 framework,” says Buck. “From the core outwards Roboteur has been developed to be the modular, dynamic low-code programming platform Z1 aspires to accelerate.
“Our vision is to drive delivery, quality and developer productivity to heights not thought possible in non-gaming industries with a product and platform developers love to use, and a community motivated to innovate and grow.”
Upcoming features in Roboteur include a reactive job engine that offers orchestration-focused programming; reactive flow with active triggers from sources; multi-skill collaboration; and multi-machine orchestration with queue chunking and delegation features.
The Shape Studio has design data templates with a drag drop interface for field composition; design mappings from various file types to data shape fields; the ability to capture and manage collections of data; team- and access-controlled sharing and collaboration; and a package repository for version control.
Buck explains that the maturity and power of the reactive job engine and shape studio will feed down into the Z1 framework to accelerate development of features including a database model UI designer; API service UI designer; front end routing and security designer; form schema designer; UI View designer; UI Reactive state flowchart designer; and DevOps studio.
“At SpacePencil, our vision is to revolutionise business software development by growing the strong union between an open-source platform and a professional commercial product to create a solution that has community, longevity and ambitious return on investment,” Buck says.