Book Image

Low-Code Application Development with Appian

By : Stefan Helzle
Book Image

Low-Code Application Development with Appian

By: Stefan Helzle

Overview of this book

This book is an exhaustive overview of how the Appian Low-Code BPM Suite enables tech-savvy professionals to rapidly automate business processes across their organization, integrating people, software bots, and data. This is crucial as 80% of all software development is expected to be carried out in low code by 2024. This practical guide helps you master business application development with Appian as a beginner low-code developer. You'll learn to automate business processes using Appian low-code, records, processes, and expressions quickly and on an enterprise scale. In a fictional development project, guided by step-by-step explanations of the concepts and practical examples, this book will empower you to transform complex business processes into software. At first, you’ll learn the power of no-code with Appian Quick Apps to solve some of your most crucial business challenges. You’ll then get to grips with the building blocks of an Appian, starting with no-code and advancing to low-code, eventually transforming complex business requirements into a working enterprise-ready application. By the end of this book, you'll be able to deploy Appian Quick Apps in minutes and successfully transform a complex business process into low-code process models, data, and UIs to deploy full-featured, enterprise-ready, process-driven, mobile-enabled apps.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
1
Section 1: No-Code with Appian Quick Apps
11
Section 3: Implementing Software
17
Section 4: The Code in Appian Low-Code

Process patterns

Patterns for process design are a bit more concrete than solution patterns and describe how to implement common requirements.

Creating process chains

If you think of an end-to-end business process, you might get the idea of implementing it the same way in Appian. So, you create one main process model, which then utilizes multiple sub-processes. This is a great idea when drawing process models for humans, but a bad idea when implementing a process model to be executed in software.

In Appian, this main model would stay active and cannot be updated until it is completed. So, any change in higher-level logic becomes complicated. Instead of this human-oriented pattern, do not implement the main process at all, but create a chain of process phases in which each phase decides about the next phase to be started. This way, there is no long-lived process instance, and updates to the parent logic are much easier.

Keep these individual process models simple and self...