Technology Trends/User Guide

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Status

Translation

Initial release

September 1, 2019

Latest version

September 1, 2019

Official publication

User Guide.pdf

This page is a work in progress. We welcome your feedback. Please use the discussion page for suggestions and comments. When the page is approved and finalized, we will send it for translation.

This User Guide provides the instruction necessary to upload a new technology trend briefing paper. Most of the code is written in HTML using the CSS style. The goal of this page is to provide a step by step guide on how to create a page.

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Initialization and Configuration

Getting a GCcollab account

Before starting to code, you will need an account on GCcollab in order to create and edit existing GCwiki source code. If you have an Governmenet of Canada email account the process should be simple. If not, a public servant with an existing account can invite you using the invite button located at the top of the dashboard.

Installing a Code Editor

Most of the code written on the technology trend page is done in HTML and CSS since they were found to be the easiest and offer versatily when it comes to styling. Therefore, it is highly recommended that you use a Code Editor for the publishing process. They are not obligatory for the purpose of publishing technology trend. However, they simplify and accelerate the process. Below are three of the most popular environment and should be sufficient for the process. These platforms offer important tools and features such as syntax highlighting, file explorers, console, etc. Since Visual Studio Code is currently the most popular choice, examples in this user guide will use this editor, however the process is similar with others.

Visual Studio Code : A completed editor where all the tools are available after installation.
Atom : A simple and lightweight editor where most features are avaiable as packages and can be installed throught the settings.
Sublime Text : A classic editor offering the barebones functionnality.

Initializing the Code Editor

After installing the editor, follow these following steps to start creating your first file. For this example, we will be using Visual Studio Code but the process is similar on other platforms.

Creating a Workspace folder : A workspace is a project folder located on your local computer that contains all of the project code. Locate a suitable directory on your computer a create an empty folder with an appropriate name (such as "GCwiki").
Adding the folder to the Editor's workspace : On Visual Studio, open the file explorer located on the left or by pressing Ctrl+Shift+E. Right click on the Workspace portion and click "Add Folder to Workspace". Locate and select the previously created folder as your new workspace.
Creating a new file : Right click on the project folder "GCwiki" and select new file. Enter an appropriate filename with an ending of ".html" such as "EN - Example.html". Use this newly created file to write all the code for the technology brief.
Adding the template's code : Navigate to the template page. On the upper navigation bar, select "view source" or, if you are logged in, "edit source". From there, copy and paste the template's code to your file. This template offers all the technology brief empty code.
Adjusting the template's code : Before starting to publish the technology brief content, you need to adjust the template's information. All comments in the brackets " need to be replace by the corresponding information. Don't forget to use the underscore (_) when using links and files

Publishing on GCwiki

During the technology trend publishing process, it is important to view how to code is being

Creating a new page : To create a new page on GCwiki, you simply have to enter the corresponding name in the URL bar on top of your browser. For example : the link for the this user guide is "https://wiki.gccollab.ca/Technology_Trends/User_Guide". The platform will offer you the option the create the corresponding page. Warning! Once a page has been created, it cannot be deleted so enter a valid name that follows the standards. For english page, name's starts with "Technology_Trends/" followed by the technology name using underscores rather than space. For french page, use "Tendances_Technologiques/" followed by the same structure.
Adding the code : Navigate to the "Edit Source" tab on top of the page to publish your code. Copy and paste the corresponding code from Visual Studio Code to GCwiki. Pres "Save changes" to publish or "Show preview" to view the resulting code.

GCwiki Standards and Norms

Visual Studio Code : Settings and Shortcuts

Here are some settings configuration

Autocomplete :

Here are some shortcuts to accelerate your process.

Autocomplete :

HTML and CSS Fundamental

This section offers a basic understanding of HTML. This markup language is designed to be displayed in web browser.

           This is <span style="color:red;">red</span> text.
           This is <span style="color:red;">red</span> text.
           This is <span style="color:red;">red</span> text.

This is red text.

Technology Trend Publishing

Technology Brief

Industry Use

Canadian Government Use

Implications for Government Agencies

Shared Services Canada (SSC)

Value Proposition

Challenges

Considerations

References

Low-code

(Some industry analysts and vendors of low-code systems use very different terminology, for example: Gartner uses high-productivity application Platform-as-a-Service (hpaPaaS).)

is built on the concept of higher abstraction levels, where the developer can directly express business processes and requirements without getting mired in coding details. For some apps developed in low-code, a small amount of simple code is typically still written by hand – especially for applications not following one of the vast number of built-in templates. (Those requiring absolutely no handwritten code are referred to as no-code apps.) This reduction in manual coding has some important effects:

App development (including feature capture, testing/validation and deployment) proceeds much faster than usual – enabling agile development, and reducing cost and improving time-to-market. As a side effect, this also reduces the number of errors and requirements mismatches.
Less coding (and less intricate coding) allows a broader range of people to engage in app development – no longer limiting this to highly skilled programmers (who are typically rare, talented, and expensive).
Low-code originally catered to apps-from-scratch, but is now also able to integrate legacy or third party systems (e.g. ERPs and databases such as SAP, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, etc.) to build complete apps even more quickly.

Low-code is not without its challenges:

Finding developers: despite the low technical barrier to usage, most low-code systems are proprietary and require at least a modest amount of system-specific training.
Highly skilled traditional developers often view low-code with skepticism and defensiveness – partly due to the slow devaluation of the traditional skill set.
Licensing costs are often opaque and somewhat higher than those of traditional development environments and tools (many of which are open-source).

According to the March 2019 Forrester Wave report, the current leading low-code systems (out of a total of 13 evaluated in this latest report) are Microsoft PowerApps, OutSystems, and Mendix (now acquired by Siemens), with Kony and Salesforce following closely. Similar vendor rankings are also given by Gartner, Ovum, and IDC.

Technology Brief

Briefly, low-code is a development environment and runtime platform that allows for building apps of almost any kind (with the exception of deeply embedded or very high-performance apps) while only writing a very small amount of simple code. In many cases, absolutely no code is written – making them “no code apps.”

To the low code developer (often someone more specialized in the application domain than in coding), the low-code tool appears like most integrated development environments (IDEs). Instead of a window in which to type code, the functionality of the application is built visually. That likely starts with drawing the windows of the application, and attaching actions (again, visually) to the various GUI elements such as buttons, drop-down menus, list boxes, etc. In general, many apps support a business process, which is then drawn diagrammatically in low-code. Each step in the business process may activate other windows or take some further action.

Such actions can involve communicating with other applications (such as email), pulling in documents, consulting a database, or taking remote action. Creating an interaction with another application is usually a simple visual connection diagrammatically, and most low-code systems support APIs (which remain only visual in low-code) to a vast number of other vendors’ applications. Similarly, pulling in documents/files is done visually, along with any processing of such files – including sharing them remotely.

One of the most significant wins in low-code is database integration: the developer drags and drops a database, which is usually then autodiscovered by the low-code environment, making the structure of the database visually obvious. The developer may then visually create database queries (in a form of visual SQL), and use those results for further processing or display in a window. Naturally, various operations across databases are also supported. The leading vendors of low-code support all of the major databases across many versions. In a limited number of cases, a very complex database query must be written by hand in SQL – though that process is coached by intelligent assistants within the tool, and is done visually.

Most real-life app development involves interfacing to legacy systems – something also well enabled in low-code. Such legacy systems (e.g. SAP, some other ERP, or database) appear as connectors in a palette of supported systems, which can then be used visually, while the low-code system manages the actual API usage.

All of the low-code systems have extensive palettes of additional components – in many cases written by the low-code vendor in other languages for performance reasons. Some of the pre-built components include:

Location services using GPS on mobile devices.
Cloud support for all of the major vendors, as well as private clouds.
Cameras, including gesture and facial recognition, etc.
Audio support, including sound generation and voice recognition/synthesis.
Multilanguage support.
Internet-of-Things (IoT) interfaces and complex event processing.
Log file and audit trail support in applications requiring governance.
Security primitives, such as encryption, signatures, and authentication.
Machine learning and artificial intelligence engines.
Visualizations for large-scale data.
Back-end interfaces to big-data systems such as Hadoop.

Low-code tools additionally have user communities contributing new components or wrappers for legacy systems, and proficient programmers (in other languages such as Java, C++, C#, etc.) can easily produce their own components as needed. The leading low-code vendors have extensive support for mobile and desktop apps, including keyboards, styluses, and touch-screens. Much of that support is encapsulated in a single project, meaning that a mobile version of an app can be co-developed with the desktop version.

Low-code environments directly support version control through a variety of interfaces such as to Git, Mercurial, Subversion, etc. This allows not only for the safety of being able to roll back changes, but also for multi-developer projects.

Following the assembly of the app, the low-code environment allows for immediately testing/debugging it without a long compile-build cycle. This directly supports agile development and co-refinement of requirements where domain experts/users can make adjustments to the app as early as possible. Such testing can be done in a staged testing platform with test databases, etc.

Finally, deployment is usually a single-step process in its lifecycle manager, where the low-code environment is aware of the deployment platform’s parameters and the app can be pushed directly into production and use. Should anything go wrong, rolling back to a previous version is usually equally easy.

Under the hood, low-code is of course also making use of traditional programming languages and tools – though this is not usually visible to the developer. The visual programming is translated directly into C#, Java or similar (some platforms such as OutSystems support both), which is then compiled using the normal development tool-chain. The low-code environment tracks the minimal amount of code generation and recompiles, allowing for a very interactive development experience oriented towards experimentation and prototyping. The output C# or Java can also be used standalone in case of a move away from low-code, though the actual code is often not elegant enough for true understandability.

Industry Use

All of the major technical industry analysts (Forrester, Gartner, Ovum, and IDC) have reported on low-code for a number of years – following Forrester naming it “low-code” in 2014. Those reports have at times identified up to fifty providers of low-code environments over the past decade. Some of those providers have faded, while three have emerged as the leading providers of very broad low-code solutions

(A broad solution is one able to interface to many other types of components (both legacy or written in other programming languages), runs on several platforms, is able to produce apps of all types.)

: Mendix (now a part of Siemens), Microsoft (with PowerApps), and OutSystems. The Forrester Wave from March 2019 is shown in Figure 1, while the 2018 Gartner Magic Quadrant is shown in Figure 2.

Technology Trends - Low Code Application Development Forrester Wave.png

Figure 1 The Forrester Wave: Low-Code Development Platforms for AD&D Professionals, Q1 2019. Used without permission.

English	Français
Challengers	Nouveaux fournisseurs
Contenders	Fournisseurs concurrents
Strong Performers	Fournisseurs performants
Leaders	Chefs de file
Stronger current offering	Offres actuelles les plus intéressantes
Weaker current offering	Offres actuelles les moins intéressantes
Weaker strategy	Stratégie plus faible
Stronger strategy	Stratégie plus solide
Market presence	Présence sur le marché
OutSystems	OutSystems
Mendix	Mendix
Kony	Kony
Microsoft	Microsoft
Salesforce	Salesforce
ServiceNow	ServiceNow
GeneXus	GeneXus
Progress Software	Progress Software
WaveMaker	WaveMaker
MatsSoft	MatsSoft
Thinkwise	Thinkwise
Skuid	Skuid
Clear Software	Clear Software

Among other requirements, the systems featured in the Forrester Wave were chosen because they each:

Offer a comprehensive declarative development approach: the level of abstraction matches that of the client, which is critical for expressing the requirements.
Provide a low-cost-of-entry commercial model: they allow for free trials, and provide online training material.
Support building many business use cases, from web and mobile apps to database, event processing, IoT, and business process apps.
Primarily target large enterprises: revenue over a billion USD and geographically dispersed teams.

Websites of the low-code tool leaders typically provide reference customers, and these include numerous prominent banks, insurance companies, airlines, government departments, and the US Army – though in most cases no details are given about the precise application domain. Most of the analysts’ reports, as well as self-reporting by OutSystems and Mendix, indicate that 88% of companies are adopting low-code, while 74% of those companies are integrating the business side into low-code development, thereby directly involving the clients who dictate the requirements.

(Example)

Technology Trends - Low Code Application Development Gartner Magic Quadrant.png

Figure 2 : Magic Quadrant de Gartner – Plate-forme d’application d’entreprise comme service à haute productivité. Utilisé sans autorisation.

English	Français
OutSystems	OutSystems
Mendix	Mendix
ServiceNow	ServiceNow
Microsoft	Microsoft
Kintone	Kintone
Caspio	Caspio
AgilePoint	AgilePoint
MatsSoft	MatsSoft
Bpm’online	Bpm’online
Quick Base	Quick Base
TrackVia	TrackVia
Fujitsu	Fujitsu
OrangeScape	OrangeScape
Zoho	Zoho
Betty Blocks	Betty Blocks
Kony	Kony
Appian	Appian
Oracle	Oracle
Pegasystems	Pegasystems

Canadian Government Use

Modern low-code can literally be used in all application areas except for deeply embedded systems and very high-performance computing, though even in those two areas, low-code can provide much of an app while interfacing to software components written in other programming languages.

Given this breadth, literally all IT application areas of the Canadian Government are candidates for low-code. For example:

Apps consisting of a business process, including interfaces to document/content management, emails for reminders, etc.
Data gathering and database apps that interface to large scale and distributed data storage – including managing identity and privacy.
Communication and task management apps that allow for chats, emails, video conferencing, and calendar management.
Data-science and visualization apps that potentially contain some machine learning or artificial intelligence to process and present large amounts of data.

Analyst group IDG and OutSystems have specifically explored OutSystems for digital government, basing their evaluation on the goals shown in Figure 3, though the conclusions are valid for all low-code systems. In particular, low-code can simultaneously increase quality while decreasing service delivery costs.

Technology Trends - Low Code Application Development Top Goals.png

Figure 3 Top Goals with Respect to the Digital Experience Provided for Citizens. Used without permission from: Improving Digital Experience for End Users in the Public Sector, IDG Research Services, December 2018.

English	Français
Increase the quality of citizen user experience	Accroître la qualité de l’expérience utilisateur du citoyen
Lower service delivery costs	Diminuer les coûts de la prestation des services
Improve data security	Améliorer la sécurité des données
Provide better access to data and information	Offrir un meilleur accès aux données et à l’information
Increase speed of service delivery	Accroître la rapidité de la prestation des services
Reduce staff time spent addressing citizen/student requests, questions, complaints	Réduire le temps consacré par le personnel à la résolution des demandes de renseignements, des questions et des plaintes des citoyens et des étudiants
Increase usage or programs/generate revenue	Accroître l’utilisation des programmes et générer des revenus
Develop user profiles to personalize transactions	Créer des profils d’utilisateurs pour personnaliser les transactions

It is worth noting that achieving these goals (likely via low-code) fits into the higher levels of Gartner's Digital Government Maturity Model (such as Level 4 and Level 5).