5 Predictions for High Productivity Platforms in 2019

We think 2019 is going to be a big year for high productivity platforms. Read our top 5 predictions and share your own.

As 2019 begins, it’s a good time to reflect on our expectations for the coming year. We think a lot about how to make developers more productive at Progress, and we think high productivity platforms are going to play a huge role in how organizations handle an ever-increasing app development workload.

However, we also think high productivity platforms are set for some big moves this year, and that the way we think of traditional low-code is going to change. Read on to see our top 5 predictions on where we think high productivity platforms will go in 2019.

The Next Generation of High Productivity Platforms Take Over

While traditional low-code vendors will attempt to re-architect their monolithic platforms, they will be disrupted by high productivity platforms that are designed to be cloud-native with support for serverless and microservices. Combining serverless and low-code will allow organizations that are under extreme pressure to meet the demands of consumer-grade multi-channel experiences with existing JavaScript developers.

Automated Machine Learning is Integrated into Daily App Dev Lifecycle

High productivity capabilities will be extended beyond the traditional App Dev lifecycle with support for an automated Data Science Lifecycle. The platform will take care of the heavy lifting required to prepare the data, perform feature engineering, ensemble model selection, and production deployment and management of production models. Predictive results will bolster the application experience with intelligence, eliminating routine user activity while providing insight when human intervention is required.

True DesignOps Makes Collaboration with Designers Easy

DesignOps will become a first-class capability alongside DevOps in high productivity app development platforms. This will allow designers to use their tool of choice, whether Sketch, UXPin, or Adobe tools, while providing a roundtrip DesigntoCode approach that will ensure pixel perfect app delivery, greatly streamline the iterations required between design and development, and extend collaboration support across designers, developers, DevOps and data scientists.

A Cloud-Native and Microservice Approach Helps Legacy Systems Modernize

Organizations will use cloud-native high productivity platforms that support microservices and serverless as a foundation for continuous migration of their legacy systems. Different architecture patterns can be leveraged to transition app workloads to the cloud without the need to move all of their data sources or related systems. Organizations can incrementally refactor the most critical and widely used slices of their monolithic code base and expose them as modern application services.

One Unified JavaScript-Based Approach Simplifies App Dev Workloads

To meet consumer-grade application experiences, high-productivity app development platforms will retire their investment in Cordova / PhoneGap technologies and adopt a full-stack JavaScript approach that provides a single approach to deliver responsive web, PWA and native mobile iOS and Android support. The platforms will complement this support with AI-driven chatbot support while making AR and VR more accessible.

We’re excited about the year to come and think the future is very bright for the next generation of high productivity platforms. Progress has been named a visionary by Gartner for our Progress Kinvey high productivity platform, and in 2019 we will continue working hard to deliver the best platform you and your teams need to build scalable consumer and enterprise apps.

A happy 2019 to all! You can read some of our favorite predictions in this SD Times article, which includes one from me. What are your predictions for this year? Feel free to share in the comments below.