Low-code defined

4 Topics 45 mins Release 5

Low-Code App Development Constellation App Studio Pega Platform 8.8 English

Pega Platform™ provides an application development environment where citizen developers and system architects alike create digital solutions to achieve business
outcomes. Get familiar with the fastest way to build an application using the main building blocks of Pega Platform in a low-code workspace like App Studio. 

After completing this module, you should be able to:

Describe the value of low-code application development.

Recognize the purpose of each Pega Platform workspace.
Find and use the navigation elements in App Studio.

Available in the following missions:

Low-Code App Builder
Introduction to Pega Platform
Application Development Foundation

Topics

Low-code application development

Forrester (https://go.forrester.com/blogs/why-you-need-to-know-about-low-code-even-if-youre-not-responsible-for-software-delivery/)describes low-code
development as "Products and/or cloud services for application development that employ visual, declarative techniques instead of programming…"
This development is exactly what Pega has been doing for 30 years — creating Software That Writes Your Software™.

As you manipulate and expand the visual model, the low-code development tools create the code for you. User interface features such as drag-and-drop,
process flows, and visual tools allow anyone to create transformational software regardless of technical ability. This approach enables increased
productivity, as everyday app development tasks are streamlined, lessening IT involvement. Low-code tools make application development simpler.

In the center of the following image, slide the vertical line to compare traditional development tools with low-code development tools:

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The value of low code

Creating powerful software is vital to organizations as the need for rapid transformation outpaces the traditional one-size-fits-all approach, where large
teams of developers build proprietary solutions. Low-code application development platforms help bridge the gap between business stakeholders and
skilled developers, creating a common visual language to collaborate more effectively. Teams that work with low-code tools are more agile, deliver value
more rapidly, and work with stakeholders more effectively. Collaborating with stakeholders in a common visual language allows you to focus on explaining
the business logic rather than the code. With shortened feedback loops, teams become more productive, freeing limited resources to tackle the ever-
expanding backlog of projects.

Tip: If you want to learn more about creating efficient and effective processes using Pega Platform's low-code application development tools, try
the 2-hour mini-mission Low-Code Maker.

Building with low code tools

Many users think that a simple, easy to understand visual development tool is limited to creating very simple applications, on par with something you could
implement in a spreadsheet. Pega's low-code platform can be used to create very robust applications in a myriad of channels. For example, a marketing
team uses a shared spreadsheet to capture and track requests. Using the low-code tools in Pega Platform™, the marketing team can build an email and
web-based request system with reporting for request visibility, notifications for collaboration, and service level agreement (SLA) tracking to ensure that work
is finished on time.

Pega's low-code technology allows you to build an application that captures data and initiates business processes. What might surprise you is the
application can be a web page, a mobile application, or a chatbot that interacts with your client over Facebook messenger. Information can be extracted
from an incoming email or a robot pulling data from other software solutions. The power of Pega's low-code technology allows you to create an application
where you can interact with your users in the channel of their choice. With omnichannel development features, organizations can unify their development
activities for all the required channels rather than maintain disparate lines of code.

Users are a great source for data, but the data that is needed is often located in another system. Through a visual interface, Pega Platform empowers users
to build integrations to these systems to obtain the data necessary to drive the process forward. Pega Platform assists users by graphically mapping data
into their application for a holistic view of the data landscape.

Low code and developers

Pega's visually-driven, end-to-end application development tools make everyone more productive — citizen developers and professional developers alike.
While low-code enables the non-developer to create application code, it also allows the experienced developer to write code more rapidly and effectively.

To enable citizen developers with additional functionality to meet your organizational needs, Pega Platform application development studios enable
developers to dive deeper to craft a solution to the business problem, hiding the implementation and visualizing the business logic for others to consume.
With patterns for reuse and extension built into the Pega platform, developers can build a solution once and leverage it many times throughout the entire
ecosystem.

Workspaces
A Pega Platform™ provides four role-based authoring workspaces, referred to as studios. Each workspace provides specific tools and features for
application development. By using the appropriate workspace, team members complete tasks by using tools that align with their expertise.

Pega Platform Role-based authoring workspaces:

App Studio: A low-code workspace designed for business architects, citizen developers and system architects.
Dev Studio: A low-code workspace with advanced configuration options for technical team members as well as system architects.
Prediction Studio: An analytics workspace used by data scientists and business decision-makers.
Admin Studio: A software administration workspace managed by IT staff for system administration.

Each studio speeds application development and enhances productivity by providing users role-based functionality.  

Note: As a best practice, system architects and other technical team members work from App Studio unless the features they need are not
available in App Studio. App Studio manages behind-the-scenes configuration, reducing the likelihood of programming errors.

In the following image, click the + icons to view a screenshot and learn more about each studio:

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Note: Depending on your screen size, icons replace text-based menu options. Hover over the icon to view the menu name.

In the following image, move the slider to see how Dev Studio displays menu names or icons depending on the screen size:

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In Pega Platform, you can improve productivity by using role-based workspaces. For example, front-end developers can design a web portal in one
workspace, such as App Studio, while system administrators switch between App Studio and Admin Studio as they configure advanced deployment
functionality and monitor run-time results.

Users can have access to one or more workspaces. When users log in, the system opens the user's default workspace. They can then switch to any other
workspace they have security access to use.

Studio navigation

Each studio consists of three areas:

A header
A navigation pane
A workspace

In the following image, click the + icons to learn more about each area:

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 Check your knowledge with the following interaction:

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App Studio
App Studio provides core features for application development, such as case design, data management, and user experience. App Studio is designed for
low-code users. Typical users include application developers, front-end developers, data engineers, business analysts, and system architects. Use App
Studio to get your applications operating quickly.
App Studio workspace

The App Studio workspace helps you visualize the key factors of the desired business process. As you outline the process, you build relationships between
stages of the process, participating personas, communication channels, and data required for process resolution. The visual model built in App Studio helps
you plan and manage your development team's workload.

The following image shows an App Studio workspace:

As a best practice, technical team members such as system architects, build applications in App Studio to reduce potential errors. Only switch to Dev Studio
when configuring advanced features that are unavailable in App Studio, such as integration services or database class mappings.

 Check your knowledge with the following interaction:

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Support for agile development

App Studio supports agile development best practices to plan and implement the features for your application. Users can quickly build off a business case
by developing a working outline of the process to be performed in a Pega Platform™ application.

App Studio also supports real-time UI design as you process the work. For example, a team that is testing the end-user interface of an online shopping
application can add new fields and make changes to user controls such as drop-down lists. This ability is helpful for reviews with stakeholders, who can see
their suggested feedback implemented in real time.

Tip: Instead of naming items in App Studio as app1, process2, field3, or step5, as a best practice, use business-friendly names, such as Feedback
app, Sales process or Send email. When building your application in App Studio, rules are auto-generated in the background with these same
names. It is easier to find a rule by name when business-friendly names are used. 

Application profile

The Application profile captures and presents user stories, bugs, and feedback items to support agile development best practices. This collection supports
collaboration across technical and business members of the team. For example, you can create a feature to support requests for new training modules in
your application. Your team can then map development tasks, such as defining a data table of available courses, to this feature by creating stories and other
work items. Features support traceability from objectives to development tasks to implementation, keeping all collaborators informed.

Modular application design

Pega Platform applications comprise instructions, called rules, that govern application behavior, just as the rules of chess govern the behavior of various
pieces. The rules that make up an application are organized into layers for reuse between applications. For example, your company may have several
applications that share a common branding. Once you create the look and feel of your application at the organization or framework layer, you can reuse it
for each new application that you build.

Application layers
Layers and the rules within them are reusable. Each layer represents a unique application and is built on one or more layers, except for the Pega Platform
layer, which includes rules for the Pega Platform itself (PegaRULES). This modular approach to application design reduces development time and improves
application quality and maintenance, even for complex applications. For example, each layer can be maintained by a dedicated development team and
updated on its own schedule based on business needs. 

The App Studio overview displays an Application layers widget, which provides a visual representation of the rules that make up your application.

Hovering your pointer over a layer title or graphic highlights the rules that the layer contributes to the application, as seen in the following figure:

Note: The Application Layers widget presents a high-level summary of the contents of your application layers, not a complete inventory of
your application. 

The Application layers widget also identifies the Pega Platform application type. Pega Platform offers two out-of-the-box (OOTB) application types:

Theme Cosmos - Theme Cosmos uses the Cosmos Rules ruleset to build applications on the traditional, section-based user-interface (UI) architecture. 
 Constellation - Constellation uses the Cosmos React ruleset to build applications on the new view-based UI architecture. The example and challenge
applications in the Low-Code App Builder mission are built on the Constellation architecture.

In the center of the following image, slide the vertical line to compare the Application layers widget for the different application types:

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Tip: You can also determine the type of application by navigating to Dev Studio, opening the application definition, and reviewing the Build on
applications section. For more information on the application definition, see Exploring the application definition.

Note: As of version 8.8, some Pega Academy content, such as missions, modules, and challenges, include a Capabilities tag of either Constellation
or Theme Cosmos to identify the built-on application type used for the example and challenge applications. For more information on the
application types, see Pega Platform application types. For more information on the Constellation's view-based  architecture, see Constellation
architecture. For more information on Theme Cosmos's traditional section-based architecture, see Traditional UI architecture.

Check your knowledge with the following interaction:

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Integrating with external applications

Integrating with external systems of record to access the data needed to power modern enterprise applications can be a complex task. The following video
explains the range of integration standards and communication protocols that are included with Pega Platform™ to simplify data integration with
applications:
 (Media embed)

Video transcript
Modern enterprise applications and the data they process are rarely self-contained. Integration protocols and interoperability standards provide access to
read and write data that is housed in a variety of systems of record; you can design applications that link multiple physically distributed resources. Pega
Platform provides a comprehensive range of data and integration capabilities that simplify the task of connecting your application to distributed resources
and gain access to the processes and data they offer.

Pega Platform supports a range of integration standards and communication protocols, allowing you to focus on addressing the business requirements of
your application rather than on connectivity development. For example, your application can connect to an external database or consume data from an
external web service.

However, many external systems still in use today were not designed to share data with other applications. These external systems do not have an API for
sharing data. Other systems may have an API that you cannot access, or the API is insufficient to support your business requirements. In these situations,
you can use the Pega Robotic Process Automation (RPA) integration capability when no other integration option is feasible.

Achieving the best business outcome requires you to align the business requirements and IT infrastructure with the most appropriate Pega integration
capability. Knowing when to apply Pega RPA as opposed to a Pega integration connector helps yield an even higher return on investment.

The following example applies the appropriate Pega integration capability to achieve an optimal business outcome.

U-Plus Bank has recently acquired several banks; as a result, there are multiple customer systems of record (SOR). When customers contact the bank to
change their address, a customer service representative (CSR) initiates a Pega change of address service case. The case prompts the CSR to enter the new
address. Once customers validate the new address, the case workflow proceeds to update the address to one of many possible systems of record. If the
address is stored within U-Plus Bank's own customer SOR, the case updates the address in real time by using a standard API connector, which exchanges
the data between the Pega application and the SOR immediately. This update is possible because both Pega and the customer system of record understand
and support a standard protocol for information exchange.

When repeating this example for customers who opened their account with one of the acquired banks, the SOR is an older legacy system that does not
support an API for data exchange. For this customer, the Pega change of address case allows the CSR to initiate Pega Robotic Process Automation in
attended mode. Attended RPA refers to automation that works alongside a human involved in the process. This automation triggers a robot to update the
address by opening the SOR’s front end, which could be a desktop or web application or even a terminal screen. The robot then fills in the new address
fields by interacting with the user interface in real time, effectively performing the same job that the CSR does manually but in a fraction of the time.

Both address change updates can also run in the background, in unattended RPA mode. The difference is that the address change request is placed in a
queue for processing later. Unattended RPA offers the advantage of optimizing system resources and reduces peak loads. This approach is also ideal when
the update process takes time because it allows the CSR to continue servicing the customer instead of waiting for the address change to complete.

Robots execute real-time attended or unattended RPA tasks. To help manage and provide insight into robot performance, Pega provides a control tower
application: Pega Robot Manager™. Pega Robot Manager allows you to monitor and schedule RPA robots and provides performance analytics for all robots.

U-Plus Bank's approach to using both Pega RPA and integration connectors to connect to different customer systems of record aligns with the bank’s long-
term strategy of unifying on a single, modernized customer SOR. Pega Platform separates the application functionality from the integration details so that it
is easy to replace robotic automations with an integration connector once the bank unifies on a single system of record. The data source and integration
layer are separated from the application layer so that future changes to the systems of record have a minimal impact on the application.

You have reached the end of this video.