Why did we do it?

History:  In the realm of the modern digital world; mobility, cloud, and the internet have been widely adopted in the last 10 years, thanks to smartphones, super-fast internet speed, and affordable cloud infrastructure. This trio-combination fired up the appetite for mobile apps more than ever in not just B2C, but also in B2B businesses of all sizes – SMBs to Fortune500.

Pain-Point:  Legacy applications and off-the-shelf business applications are not able to fill in this evergrowing void. Not to mention, traditional development strategies and timelines are affecting business growth, a clear situation of IT teams not able to match the business demands.

Fail-Fast: It is very rare or doesn’t even exist to develop a digital solution that would fit 100% to the needs of the business. Businesses constantly evolve and those changes are to be reciprocated blazingly fast in existing applications to support seamless business operations. This landscape of ever-changing needs is piling up the product backlog no matter how quick and efficient engineering delivers. Also, the business wants to fail fast, which gives an edge on improvising the go-to-market strategy, refine product or service offering, and bag better traction.

Opportunity: The demand for multi-channel apps (web, mobile, and tablet(Android and iOS) is the genesis to incorporate our company(VoltusWave) and grab this opportunity to develop a no-code app development platform, that could churn out apps lightning-fast, and manage the changes seamlessly in tight deadlines. The catch here is customization and I shall explain in detail how we’re able to accommodate at a later stage on this page.

Market: However, the rule of thumb is to evaluate the market size, understand the jargon for this space, followed by market size, growth rate(CAGR), key players, adoption rate, trends, competitive advantage (pricing, feature-advantage-benefit, value offerings), customer segmentation, buyer persona profiling, customer acquisition cost to overall lifetime value.

How did we do it?

Business Objective:  We are very clear that our target user, who shall be building apps on the platform is ideally a non-technical business user. This strategy would open doors to onboard non-technical Subject Matter Experts, Individual Consultants, and Domain experts to build apps on their own for their customers and publish in the app marketplace.

Technology Stack:  Now, I shall get into little bit technical details on the technologies tried, where we failed with a few of them and how did we eventually figure it out. The app development starts at defining entities(tables or objects), metadata(schema) for entities, establish relationships between entities, and design web and mobile screens, followed by workflow, RBAC, validations, business rules, notifications, and other peripherals.

So, the first step is to make a drag-and-drop entity schema builder and the app developer should be able to establish relationships between entities – one to one, one to many, and many to many (1–>1, 1–>N, M–>N). We tried multiple NoSQL databases for schema storage and we are in need of one where it should support server push, that facilities collaboration for app developers, after persistent research, we finally choose couchbase for storing schema.

The challenge with couchbase is it’s eventually consistent and doesn’t support ACID transactions, which makes it unfit as a source of truth. Also, business demanded a seamless interaction for app developers to make distributed joins a cakewalk, which moved us in the direction of a graph database and found Dgraph deemed fit. Last but not least, we need an RDBMS to support external integrations.

We choose node.js for backend, vue.js as a frontend, Kafka for message queueing, and NGINX as a load balancer, adhered to a microservices architecture, and adopted a containerization strategy, dockerized all our microservices making the platform cloud-agnostic.

The end goal of developing an immutable metadata store with version control and event replay, declarative logic parser, custom workflow engine, and WYSIWYG UI builder and native renderer for web, android, and iOS has been achieved in less than two years from the inception.