Low-Code Application Development with Appian

Go from no-code to low-code and translate your business requirements into full-fledged enterprise-ready applications

Key Features

• Digitize and automate your business processes quickly using Appian's powerful low-code functionalities
• Understand enterprise data models and turn them into actionable Appian Records
• Use declarative code-style UI building to design intuitive UIs and reusable components in Appian

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Use Appian Quick Apps to solve the most urgent business challenges
• Leverage Appian's low-code functionalities to enable faster digital innovation in your organization
• Model business data, Appian records, and processes
• Perform UX discovery and UI building in Appian
• Connect to other systems with Appian Integrations and Web APIs
• Work with Appian expressions, data querying, and constants

Who this book is for

This book empowers software developers and tech-savvy business users with a new tool that’ll help them increase efficiency by a huge margin and speed up the delivery of new features to meet the demands of business departments. Business users with a maker's attitude finally have the chance to develop their own business applications, as low-code drastically reduces the complexity of traditional software development. Prior experience with automation solutions and low-code programming is needed to help you get the most out of this book.

Table of Contents

1. Create an Appian Quick App
2. Features and Limitations of Appian Quick Apps
3. Building Blocks of Appian Quick Apps
4. The Use Cases for Appian Quick Apps
5. Understanding the Business Context
6. Understanding Business Data in Appian Projects
7. Understanding Business Processes in Appian Projects
8. Understanding UX Discovery and UI in Appian Projects
9. Modeling Business Data with Appian Records
10. Modeling Business Processes in Appian
11. Creating User Interfaces in Appian
12. Task Management with Appian
13. Reporting and Monitoring with Appian
14. Expressing Logic with Appian
15. Using Web Services with Appian Integrations
16. Useful Implementation Patterns in Appian

Stefan Helzle is a Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers WPG GmbH, Germany. He has dedicated his career to low-code enterprise software development and is an Appian Certified Solution Architect and Appian Certified Lead Developer with sectoral expertise in Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, IT Services, and Pharmaceuticals. He has been working since 2009 as a Business Analyst, Appian Senior Developer, and Consultant Appian Solution Architect. Since 2015, Stefan has built a team of over 30 Appian Designers, conducted foundation training for almost 100 colleagues and clients, and mentored and coached all colleagues, and supported them in more than 30 projects. He has worked on Appian projects as diverse as re-insurance claims management and underwriting, a management suite for podiatry therapists, ITIL-based IT service management, procurement (request, approvals, tendering, supplier management), car financing and leasing processes end-to-end, document intake OCR and data extraction platform.