We are launching our PLATMA platform and we want to share our experience of this exciting adventure with all our subscribers, readers and partners. It was the main reason to start this series of posts and articles — to tell you our story, our entire route from the idea to implementation, from versatile separated thoughts to a common harmonized concept, from one man with a dream to a highly engaged motivated team of like-minded people. In our series of posts and articles, we’ll communicate valuable technical information about our Builder on the front-end, tools or workflows on the back-end, connectors to data sources, and AI technologies we exploit. Also, we’ll publish interviews with our product owner, technical staff, development experts, and business analysts and share with you our ready-to-use templates with functionality descriptions and use cases. We believe in the community’s power and encourage everyone to contribute to low/no-code development. We welcome you to join our story, and let’s hit this road together!

The most crucial thing at every start is to guarantee the correct meaning of every term to avoid misunderstanding. And we’re not an exclusion. We strive to get on the same page with our readers and users. And below, we’d like to share our main terms and definitions to be used across posts and articles.

So, let’s clear the picture about low/no-code development and traditional coding. At PLATMA, we use a low/no-code approach to facilitate application manufacturing. Yes, we use “manufacturing” as this word best describes our philosophy, reflected in our brand name….Be patient; we’ll also share it.

Low-code
This method of designing and developing software uses intuitive graphical tools and built-in functions that reduce traditional (expert) coding requirements. Professional traditional coding remains part of the development process, but the low-code approach supports an enhanced and simplified experience that advanced users can quickly master.
No-code
This method closely resembles the low-code user experience, allowing even non-technical business users (citizen developers) to create (to manufacture) applications without the need to write a string of code. This is our aim, to substitute even low-code with no-code. We puzzle our heads about making complex things simple. And we’re on guard for your concerns about implementing and digitalizing ideas using as little code as possible.

Traditional Coding

In traditional coding, a developer writes explicit instructions (code) following specifically defined rules that tell the computer (process) what to do. The computer then executes these instructions to solve a specific problem or complete a particular task.

Now that the picture about low/no-code is clear. Let’s move to the rest of the essential definitions in our PLATMA universe. The terms below relate to our vision, concept, and community.

BPaaS
Business Process as a Service involves providing services to address business tasks with solutions based on cloud technologies. Opportunities to work with this model arise when client companies need to automate repetitive, routine work but need permanent managers.

Gartner defines business process as a service (BPaaS) as the delivery of business process outsourcing (BPO) services sourced from the cloud and constructed for multitenancy. Services are often automated, and where human process actors are required, no overtly dedicated labor pool per client exists. The pricing models are consumption-based or subscription-based commercial terms. As a cloud service, the BPaaS model is accessed via Internet-based technologies. 

This is our core business model, which will be available to you on our PLATMA platform.

Cloud solutions
This technology involves processing and storing information not on a computer but in another location. Access to cloud resources is provided to users through an internet connection without being tied to specific hardware or storage.

Cloud IT infrastructure
This refers to the computing resources of data centers that a company uses through equipment rental from providers. Cloud IT infrastructure offers greater reliability and easy scalability, contributing to its popularity.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Artificial Intelligence (AI) approach refers to the capability of computer systems to perform complex tasks that usually only a human could do. These tasks might include analyzing accidents, situations, and events to perform reasoning, making decisions, or solving problems based on gained “experience”. 

Today, the term “AI” describes a spectrum of technologies empowering many of the services we use daily —from apps that recommend TV shows to chatbots that provide live customer support.

At our PLATMA platform, we use AI to help you in manufacturing applications. Moreover, you’ll be able to control AI actions with our voice! Sounds fantastic? Indeed, this feature has an overwhelming potential.

OSS
Open-source software is software distributed with open-source code. Such applications can be modified (altered, supplemented) to suit specific tasks without violating developers’ copyrights. They can also be studied for vulnerabilities, used for developing other programs, etc.

Citizen developers
This is our greatest hope and driving force to move towards enhancement and coverage of services. Motivated people + proper ideas = fruitful cooperation.

In our concept, citizen developers create IT products without traditional coding experience or professional education. Today, with the increasing availability of low/no-code development tools, this share of users gets increasingly involved in creating and publishing programs and applications. And, from our side, we allow them to manufacture applications, complex or simple, using a set of tools on the PLATMA platform like Builder, workflows, connectors, and data sources. We contribute to low/no-code development methodology by providing citizen developers with tutorials, descriptions, and, first of all, with reliable low/no-code tools.

Follow us to learn our vision of low/no-code philosophy in the next article:

“What is no/low-code concept? Retrospective of low/no-code concepts in business processes (optimization, scalability, automation)”.