With the release of Pega Platform 8.8, new features have been included to make it easier for citizen developers to build more sophisticated apps with greater independence.
For citizen developers, our view of App Studio is that it’s the place to assemble apps and workflows in a way that leverages a combination of out-of-the-box functionality and other reusable components made available from an organization’s Center of Excellence. That way everyone can rest assured that citizen developers can build in ways that will be easy to upgrade and that mitigates the potential for risk to the organization. Enhancements to App Studio in Pega Platform 8.8 are designed to speed up development, create more delightful end-user experiences, and more easily manage data.
1. Improved parity in Constellation for faster and more robust UI experiences
With Pega Infinity 8.8, we’ve moved toward greater parity between our Traditional and new Constellation architectures. For citizen developers who want to build high-quality internal apps fast, we believe that it’s important for them to think about configuring the UI rather than customizing it. And that’s one of the things that Constellation makes possible: for citizen developers to quickly create powerful experiences that are consistent, upgradable, and that do not hide application logic in the wrong places (i.e., in the UI layer).
2. Improving productivity through AI-Assisted development
The new Developer Assistant Panel in App Studio provides contextual knowledge articles and guidance as you move through the tool, using artificial intelligence to offer relevant feedback on available options for how things should be configured, including warnings where guardrails are violated.
The new Developer Assistant Panel also brings together existing content that was in App Studio before, but that may have been difficult for some users to find, like checklists and Agile Workbench (Which allows for seamless integration with most common project management frameworks).
The new Developer Assistant Panel is good for citizen developers, because it fosters a spirit of exploration and self-discovery. And it’s good for coaches who increasingly only need to advise citizen developers on exceptional situations rather than on basic platform features. In this release, the focus was on guidance related to microjourneys, but you can expect to see support for the full range of App Studio experiences in future releases.
3. Complex relationships and seamless integrations
Pega Infinity 8.8 has added support for complex, many to many relationships. For example, adding products with multiple vendors, or vendors with multiple products. Previously, this kind of data relationship would have required the assistance of a more seasoned Pega developer in Dev Studio.
Open Data Protocol (OData) support makes it easier than ever for a citizen developer to consume interoperable REST APIs in a simple and standard way. Support for OData has been a long-standing request from our developer community, and we are pleased to begin making it available in App Studio as part of our 8.8 release.
4. Quick and easy data management
This is perhaps the most exciting update to App Studio for citizen developers in Pega Infinity 8.8. Applications that simply manipulate data through the ability to perform create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) functions are among the most common use cases for citizen developers, but until now App Studio has lent itself more to the creation of workflows than to apps like this.
With the new ability of perform CRUD actions, it now becomes possible to take any data object, create a view, put it in a table, and make it available in any portal that you want. In other words, Pega now let’s citizen developers create simple apps faster than ever before.
To learn more about what Pega Infinity has to offer for citizen developers, check out What’s New on Pega Community, and take it for a spin yourself using the Pega Community Edition.
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