What is the no-code movement?

- At the beginning of the web, all web pages were coded by hand using HTML. If you wanted a website, you'd have to learn how to write HTML, learn about FTP to put your files online, and learn about web hosting in order to get a site posted. Then along came some of the world's first no-code options for creating websites. Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver were among the first visual editors for creating webpages. They automated posting sites to web hosts and allowed editing without having to learn HTML. These types of tools carried us through the early days of the web. However, by the early 2000s, demand was growing for a system that would allow clients to create their own content online without involving an HTML developer. Big news sites like CNN had tools like this called content management systems. However, they cost millions of dollars and had a very small market as a result. Around this time, Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress were born as the first open-source content management systems. The software was free, but you had to install it on your web host yourself. You could configure the software to do what was needed within various limits. These systems became wildly popular, taking over much of the internet. Indeed, today WordPress alone powers 40% of websites, according to W3Techs. As for sites running any content management system, WordPress runs 65.1% of those sites. WordPress remains popular to this day as a low-code tool for building websites. Early in the 2010s, a new world opened in JavaScript adding web browser technologies such that more complicated interfaces could run in the web browser. These advances powered a third wave of no-code tools for building websites. In 2021, these tools are finally coming to fruition as serious contenders for building the next generation of websites. With hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital funding, this third wave of no-code web design tools is opening web design and web application development to those with little or no technology background or knowledge of HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. Furthermore, these no-code and low-code solutions are making their way to professional development as well. Designers are building interfaces with Webflow, for example, then turning their designs over to developers to add all kinds of additional functionality. It's still early days for no-code and low-code solutions. Many of the companies behind these technologies are small startups. There's lots of mergers and acquisitions happening as well as people starting businesses and going out of business. There's lots of venture capital money floating around. It'll take a few years for these technologies to become more stable, but it's worth looking at the kinds of problems these tools are solving today with an eye towards that future. Finally, I wanted to bring no-code tools to your awareness for two major reasons. First, if you become a professional coder, you're going to encounter these tools in your career. You'll be asked to integrate your code with them, add extra features and functionality for them, or write code, like an API, that's designed to be consumed by a no-code tool. But the second reason is this, not every problem on the web requires a custom-coded solution. Many problems may be solved with out-of-the-box software. This is the world that no-code serves best. These problems aren't less worthy of solutions requiring less work or less skill. They're simply problems that don't require the time, money, and resources of a customized programming team to solve them. This next chapter explores the types of solutions currently available to address everyday problems on the web. After all, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are actively monitoring this space. At Microsoft, a simple run of the numbers on how many apps will be built in the next five years shows how critical low-code and no-code software will become. Microsoft expects 500 million new apps to be built in the next half decade, which is more than all of the apps built in the last 40 years. Charles Lamanna, corporate vice president of the citizen applications platform at Microsoft, said "If that's true, 450 million have to be built with a low-code tool. There are not enough humans to code fast enough to build that many. Professional developers should focus on harder challenges than another expense submission form or approval form." No-code may be viewed as an alternative path in web development now, but before long it will be the primary path to getting problems solved on the web. Let's dive in and see what's happening in the no-code and low-code world today.