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Home ยป App Development ยป How Visual LANSA streamlines the development process

How Visual LANSA streamlines the development process

By LANSA Editors
Published On October 11, 2023

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Application development requires a wide range of skills and significant resources. In today’s competitive global landscape, the traditional step-by-step approach often struggles due to its inherent complexities. Developers must navigate diverse coding languages, complex architecture designs, and evolving compatibility issues across platforms and devices. These challenges can result in delays, budget overruns, and subpar applications. Staying current with evolving paradigms and tools is itself a formidable task.

Fortunately, Visual LANSA, a professional low-code development solution, has emerged as a beacon of innovation, addressing the pain points of the application development process. From the initial stage of prototyping to the development of responsive UI across multiple platforms, Visual LANSA offers a cohesive solution. This revolutionary approach enables developers to use a unified language in both front-end and back-end development, fostering innovation and accelerating time-to-market.

Five undeniable benefits of Visual LANSA

Visual LANSA revolutionizes the development process, enabling developers to create applications ten times faster than traditional coding methods, catapulting businesses ahead in today’s fast-paced market. With shorter development cycles, you’ll quickly respond to changing customer demands and industry trends, gaining a competitive edge.

Moreover, Visual LANSA’s unified language eliminates the need for a specialized team, conserving valuable resources. Its flexibility means you can adapt your applications on the fly, ensuring your business remains agile and responsive in the ever-evolving business landscape. Unlike other platforms, Visual LANSA gives you the freedom to build and customize applications as per your unique requirements, making it a true game-changer for your business. Let’s dive into its key benefits below.

1. Faster development cycles

With Visual LANSA, developers can build applications ten times faster than traditional coding methods, which require months or even years. This professional low-code solution provides pre-built modules and visual interfaces that simplify the development process. Rather than writing tons of code from scratch, developers can build an application with predefined components and intuitive drag-and-drop features. Itโ€™s like building with blocks, where you can create something amazing by just assembling the pieces. By leveraging Visual LANSA as a software development solution, you can not only embrace faster development cycles, but also be able to respond swiftly to changing customer demands, emerging opportunities, and industry trends.

2. Improved time-to-market

In todayโ€™s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, speed is of the essence. When it comes to application development, time-to-market can make all the difference. This is where Visual LANSA truly shines. This cutting-edge solution enables businesses to accelerate their development cycle to stay ahead of the competition. Traditional coding methods not only make the development process complex but also time-consuming. However, Visual LANSA changes the game by enabling developers to transform their ideas into fully functional applications with less coding.

3. Fewer resources required

Visual LANSA enables businesses to achieve more with fewer resources. Traditionally, a development team requires a big team of developers with specialized skills and programming language knowledge in both front-end and back-end development. The introduction of Visual LANSA enables developers to work in a single language for both aspects, eliminating the need for specialized experts to have knowledge of different programming languages. Furthermore, the reusable components reduce redundancy in coding and optimize resource allocation.

4. Greater business agility

The beauty of Visual LANSA as a professional low-code development solution is not just in its speed. Itโ€™s also about adaptability and flexibility. With this development solution, businesses can not only expand their applications as per their requirements, but can also easily modify them without having to go back to the drawing board. It enables businesses to swiftly move to the latest trends and quickly adapt to market changes. Unlike other application development platforms, where developers solely rely on vendor provisions, Visual LANSA allows developers to build any type of application and customize it freely as per their requirements.

Key features of Visual LANSA that streamline the development process

From enhancing customer experience and streamlining operations to automating processes and modernizing applications, Visual LANSA is a versatile solution capable of addressing a wide range of challenges. Here is a rundown of the key features of this professional low-code solution that serves as the backbone of the application development process.

1. Prototyping

Prototyping is a simple and effective way to manage the expectations of end-users and uncover hidden or new business requirements. Visual LANSA revolutionizes the prototyping phase of the development process by enabling the developers to quickly create interactive and tangible representations of the applicationโ€™s UI and functionality before the actual development phase begins. Moreover, it helps users visualize the application initially in the development cycle, allowing them to identify areas missing in the design and provide their feedback before starting with coding. It helps in reducing the likelihood of costly changes during later development phases. Whether validating UI design, refining business logic, or testing user workflows, Visual LANSAโ€™s prototyping feature ensures that developers align the application with user expectations.

Consider a scenario where a development team has to build a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application. Traditionally, prototyping involves a lot of coding to showcase the basic functionality of the application. Visual LANSA simplifies the entire process by enabling developers to use pre-defined components and effortlessly drag-and-drop pre-built elements to incorporate basic functionalities into the application. It not only helps the development team to share a tangible vision from the project’s inception with stakeholders, but also accelerates the feedback loop.

Visual LANSA prototyping assistant

2. Repository

The repository is the game-changing feature of Visual LANSA, providing a centralized space for storing reusable logic and components. It is a collection of information about the application, including tables, fields, rules, components, relationships, system variables, and more. Basically, a repository acts as a database that Visual LANSA uses to build and execute the application.

The reusable logic and components in the repository act as plug-and-play; anyone with significant programming and application-building knowledge can use them to build their application. Developers can use these reusable components to develop applications quickly without starting from scratch. For example, if a development team is building an E-commerce platform where they need to include a secure payment gateway, they can add this functionality without writing new code using Visual LANSA. Developers just need to tap into the repository to access the pre-built components for payment processing.


3. RDML language for full-stack development

Visual LANSA uses a single language, RDML (Repository Definition Markup Language), from the front-end to the back-end. It enhances the development process by providing a standardized markup language for configuring as well as defining application components within the repository. For instance, letโ€™s say a developer wants to implement a new feature in their application that involves changes in database schema and user interface. With the RDML language, developers can easily make these changes using a single language. It eliminates the need for multiple developers to have knowledge of different programming languages. In addition, the use of a single language in both the front-end and back-end minimizes the chances of errors that may occur when translating requirements from one language to another.

Packaging Web Applications

4. Cross-platform support

Multi-device compatibility is a great and valuable feature of Visual LANSA. In a traditional development environment, developers often face the challenge of creating a separate codebase for Windows, macOS, and mobile platforms. It not only leads to duplicated efforts, but also makes the development process complex and time-consuming. Visual LANSA’s cross-platform support addresses this issue by allowing developers to write code once and deploy the application across multiple platforms.

Visual LANSA enables developers to create applications that can run on different operating systems and devices. It eliminates the need to code separate applications for each platform, saving time and resources. This capability is crucial in todayโ€™s competitive environment, where omnipresence is key.

5. Responsive UI/UX

Letโ€™s face it, developing responsive applications can be a daunting task. Visual LANSA simplifies the process of implementing responsive design with minimal coding. It allows developers to design interfaces that automatically adapt to various devices with different screen sizes. For example, letโ€™s say you want to develop a human resources management application using Visual LANSA. With its responsive UI/UX feature, developers can create a user interface that adjusts its layout and various elements based on whether the application is accessed on a laptop, desktop, tablet, or smartphone.

This cutting-edge tool not only caters to the expectations of todayโ€™s tech-savvy businesses but also reduces the effort required to build different interfaces for each device. By leveraging Visual LANSA’s responsive UI/UX capabilities, developers only need to focus on designing a single interface that helps save time and effort in the development process.

Revolutionize development process with Visual LANSA

Building applications with Visual LANSA is a game-changer in the world of digitization. Its low-code nature reduces the need for deep expertise in multiple programming languages, facilitating effective collaboration among developers from various backgrounds and breaking down traditional development silos. This fosters creative problem-solving and expedites development cycles, addressing the scarcity of developers skilled in all required languages.

Visual LANSA not only alleviates the challenges of application development but also accelerates innovation and market entry. It seamlessly aligns with the agile and ever-evolving business landscape, where adaptability and efficiency are key to success in the digital era. Developers can now leverage professional low-code to exceed the demands of a competitive and evolving business world.

Elevate your development experience

Are you ready to revolutionize your development process? Instead of spending too much time and resources writing extensive code from scratch, why not utilize Visual LANSA to build your dream application? Unlock innovation with this professional low-code development solution and have your ideal application up and running in no time.

Whether you’re a seasoned developer or just stepping into the world of coding, our professional low-code solution provides a seamless approach to building cross-platform applications end-to-end. Contact us today to start your rapid application development journey.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

LANSA Editors

LANSA is a professional low-code development platform that helps businesses efficiently build and modernize software. In this blog, the team draws on decades of experience empowering enterprises to innovate on the IBM i and future-proof their mission-critical systems.

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