This year, a lot of business development started to talk about nocode and lowcode, which shows that the Internet today may not be able to make up any good stories.

In previous articles, we’ve talked about automation, platformization, and intermediation, but no matter how much the business model changes, there will always be some local system within the enterprise that can eventually settle down the development model into a drag-and-drop “master web maker” system.

For companies like Ali, after the middle platform is implemented and iterated for many years, there will not be too many coding tasks in the process change of the core business. From the internal data, there is no need for programmers to do development by applying the previous business model, modifying configuration or going on activities.

No matter which company we are in, as long as we do the system according to the idea of “Looking for technical content in the business system”, we will be able to automate most of the tedious and repetitive work in the end. The 80-80 law, that is, the 80% of repetitive labor can be completely eliminated by means of interface, systematization and process. The remaining 20% of requirements are developed manually, and then common logic and functionality are gradually deposited.

If you’ve gone through a full middle Platform iteration process in your organization, you know that the middle platform itself can have a lot of problems, as I’ve written about in the end of The Middle Platform, and many of the same problems that lowcode and NoCode face.

We can simply divide abstraction and encapsulation into layers:

For a system to claim nocode, it must basically be at the top and have done a lot of accumulation and modeling for the domain in order to apply the business capabilities of the past (don’t get too complicated, it could actually be a payment interface with a lot of code in it). As for LowCode, in addition to being able to build the process in an interface way, the bottom layer should also be exposed when it needs to be extended so that programmers can write code to patch system functions. At the same time, you need to be able to turn this code into a visible interface element, even if it only shows up as a “custom process.”

On closer look, this is nothing new, many lowCode/NoCode implementations are little more than a hybrid of Dreamweaver + Serverless back-end description + BPM, what’s an Internet company programmer to be proud of?

They’ve been around for a long time, so LET me give you a few examples:

super mario maker

At its core, Super Mario Build is a very, very simple game engine, with controls and physics built in, and users can design their own levels by simply dragging and dropping them. In Super Mario Maker 2, there are many official levels that are completely replicable, like this one.

It’s an intuitive guess that this tool can’t do everything code can, since writing code directly is pretty much everything. But that doesn’t stop players from playing the game with their own creativity, and making ideas that even the official creators would have marveled at.

The supplementary navigation

It’s a game engine, but this time you can use it to make more types of games.

It’s also an attempt to simplify the game engine itself and make it easier for people with no programming background to work on software projects. Hey, do you feel like you have a visual?

RPG Maker MV

RPG Maker MV is software for RPG games. You don’t have to have a programming base to make your own RPG, and there’s been a lot of good stuff done on this system.

The idea has always been there, but the people in the game circle don’t publicize it, and the people in the Internet circle don’t know what the excitement is. Maybe the investors really have nowhere to spend their money.