As a development team, we began our SAP Commerce implementation journeys in 2014 as individual developers either working in the industry or implementation partners. We originally landed on the SAP Commerce platform because of our respective Java development backgrounds. I started learning Java in 1996, and deployed my first production Java application in 1997. Even though I have been working as a professional software engineer for over two decades, I am still very excited to learn something new that can help our clients save money and/or deliver solutions more quickly.
Low-Code/No-Code (LCNC) Application Development
I had been hearing so much hype about low-code/no-code (LCNC) application development since 2020. As a developer, I dismissed the hype merely as marketing jargon. Earlier this year, a client asked us for our professional opinion on LCNC. Our first reaction was to downplay the LCNC hype, but we owed it to ourselves, and more importantly, to our client to get our hands dirty with LCNC development before providing any feedback to him. What we learned was astonishing, and we could not have been more wrong about LCNC!
SAP AppGyver
We soon realized that there were many LCNC application development environments. We decided to perform deep dives on SAP AppGyver (for obvious reasons) and Bubble.io. In this article, we will focus our energies on SAP AppGyver. We were intrigued when we first learned that SAP AppGyver supports cross-platform development by generating React code for Web-based applications and React Native for native mobile applications with little or no client-side coding. In native mobile software development projects, the user experience (client-side) development can consume 60-70% of the overall implementation time. In general, most of our clients have avoided building native mobile storefronts with SAP Commerce Cloud due to expensive implementation costs. We believe LCNC solutions, like SAP AppGyver, have the potential to accelerate native mobile development by a factor of 5x! Yes, that's quite a lofty statement!
What's Next?
Over the next several months, we are planning to release a series of SAP AppGyver and SAP Commerce Cloud integration tutorials.
