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Appian Quick Apps – Low Code Platform

Appian Quick Apps – Low Code Platform

TAKE NOTE (Insights into SAP solutions and Emerging Technology)

Appian has delivered Quick Apps, a new platform to help bridge the developer skills gap by enabling users to build apps with little or no code.

Tapping into the trend of empowering so-called “citizen developers” with tools to quickly create enterprise applications, Business Process Management (BPM) platform provider Appian has announced its new Quick Apps product that lets users build apps in a few short steps.

At its Appian World 2016 conference in Washington, D.C., this week, Appian unveiled the latest version of its BPM and Case Management platform, including the new Quick Apps offering. Malcolm Ross, vice president of product marketing at Appian, told eWEEK the new release helps businesses accelerate their digital transformation efforts with new design capabilities, as well as other platform-wide enhancements.

“The inspiration of the Quick Apps solution is we’ve seen this continuing demand from the market, from IT organizations, to do more with less and to allow more people inside the organization to generate technical software solutions to help create a digital transformation inside their organization,” Ross said.

With Appian’s new Quick Apps, citizen developers can create fully functional applications in 15 minutes or less with no technical knowledge, Ross said. The Quick Apps Designer prompts users for the key points of their application. Then, all necessary data, forms and processes are auto-generated, resulting in a fully functional Quick App. The app may be used as-is to support dynamic, data-centric work, he said.

Clay Richardson, principal analyst at Forrester Research, who spoke at Appian World 2016, said Forrester has been tracking the low-code application development trend and has identified 42 companies providing tools for this space. Appian ranks among the leaders, he said. When Forrester began looking at the market in 2014 it sized the low-code market as being worth about $1.5 billion. Richardson said it is at about $2.5 billion today and will grow to between $13 billion and $15 billion by 2020.


UNDER DEVELOPMENT(Information for ABAP Developers)

Declaring and Creating Variables in ABAP 7.4

One of the main differences between ABAP and other languages is that in ABAP we have been taught to declare all our variables at the start of the program—for example, in the TOP INCLUDE. While this may be an Official ABAP programming Guideline, many of my ABAP brethren will declare a variable just before it is used. This helps with context and readability.

The good news is that as time goes on, changes in the ABAP language make this unofficial practice more and more acceptable. This blog will discuss several features that contribute to this shift.

Omitting Data Type Declarations

In ABAP the compiler knows what data type it wants, in fact it has to know in order to be able to perform a syntax check, so why not let it decide the data type of your variable and create it? This is the very feature now available to us in ABAP 7.4. In the examples ahead, you will see how letting the compiler decide the data type—instead of declaring it yourself—can save you several lines of code.

For instance, here is some code you are probably used to …

Before ABAP 7.4

DATA: lv_vehicle TYPE string.
lv_vehicle = ‘Mercedes’.

What if instead, you could code this…

With ABAP 7.4

DATA(lv_vehicle) = ‘Mercedes’.

OR this…

Before ABAP 7.4

DATA: lv_rows TYPE i.
lv_rows  = LINES( itab)

Becomes…

With ABAP 7.4

DATA(lv_rows) = LINES( itab ).

As you can see, this has the potential to dramatically reduce the number of lines in your programs. The new declaration operator DATA(…) is called an inline declaration.

What about field symbols?

Read More.


Q&A (Post your questions to Facebook or Twitter and get the answers you need)

Q. We are trying to debug a BAPI call from an external system using session break-points. The debugger is not openings for us. Is there a way to do this easily?

A. Breakpoints are used to interrupt the program execution and let you debug and analyze the ABAP program. If you set a session breakpoint in an ABAP program ,the program execution stops, and the debugger session opens when the execution reaches the breakpoint position. However, if the program is called externally by an RFC or HTTP interface, the session breakpoints can’t interrupt the program execution.

Try this…

Adjust the debugging settings in the ABAP Editor tab of the User-Specific Settings window. Open this window by choosing Utilities ->Settings in the ABAP Workbench.

Set the username of the ID that will run the program externally. Then set the breakpoint using the Set/Delete External Breakpoint button  on the toolbar in the ABAP Editor. This is different then the Session Breakpoint.

When the specified breakpoint is reached by this user, an ABAP Debugger starts in a new session, and you can start your debugging process from this point.

External breakpoints are valid for the entire AS ABAP system by default. You can also set the validity of the breakpoint for only the current application server by using the Only Current ApplicationServer checkbox on the Debugging tab shown above.

Cheers!

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