Dear reader, if the headline above caught your attention and you decided to see what it is about, you must be asking yourself – what on earth is this “FIYU”?
I’m not surprised because FIYU is a new “player“ in the world of rapid software development or rapid application development (RAD). At least we intend to globally help the developer community to speed up development and cut development expenses, but at the same time, maintain the level of code quality and the development process in general.
But before I get into the details of how FIYU achieves all that, let me explain the main reasons to even consider using a full-code, rapid development platform like FIYU. Well, first of all, when we are starting to develop a software product from scratch, we have an idea, or we already have the old-school business requirements written in detail (remember waterfall).
In any case, we must tackle repetitive activities such as setting up a repository for our source code, setting up a local environment, and maybe setting up development, test, or staging environments. After that, we need to set up CI/CD routines for every environment. Ok, maybe for some of these activities, you have already prepared procedures and scripts that will speed some things up, but still, they must be done manually.
Apart from that, it is always important to have well-defined user management with adequate security involved. That includes well-defined roles, permissions, user rights, and so on. User management might not be part of the core business idea or requirement, but it is an important and serious job that needs to be done, and it takes a significant amount of time, whether we like it or not. And in development, as in business in general, time means money.
Finally, using the full code approach in RAD gives us more granularity and control over the code we create. That enables any development team to maintain, debug, and organize code and the project itself more easily. Let’s dig a bit deeper into those three benefits that FIYU can deliver.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
The first benefit is out-of-the-box infrastructure as a service. I’m sure that we all can agree that an important part of any software project is infrastructure. Without it, we are doomed to a local environment and a rudimental setup that cannot deliver scalability, availability, and control over any aspect of the software we aim to create. We solve that by providing FIYU as the out-of-the-box Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS).
We are sure that FIYU enables faster software delivery, but also, we found a way to deliver FIYU faster. It means that no one has to spend days setting up infrastructure (cloud or on-premise), source code repositories, continuous integration, and continuous deployment procedures because they are made automatically at the very beginning of project setup.
Yes, as I mentioned earlier, any experienced software development team can set up the infrastructure quickly and easily, but it is still work that needs to be done. With FIYU, the job is done automatically in minutes. I’m sure that it can be very beneficial in project timelines and cost calculation. I must not forget to mention that databases of your preference can be provided on the fly and prepare all the necessary setups to start your development journey.
Built-in modules
The second benefit is something that we’ve identified as common functionality for any application. I believe you will agree with me that any application needs user management functionalities with all bells and whistles, user data, user roles, rights, and so on. So, we have developed and provided a fully functional user management module.
Those users need to be organized, and we need to set up a hierarchy. For that, we have the organization management module. Also, this module enables us to differentiate organizations and achieve a higher level of business model complexity, achieve multitenancy, internationalization, etc.
The third mandatory module is the platform management module which provides an overall overview of FIYU setup and management of the whole platform at a higher level.
The other three modules are non-mandatory, helper modules that serve as communication between the application and the user and between the users themselves. So, we have a notification and email module, and finally, our document management module that helps us to manage all documents in the selected organization.
With FIYU’s nature to extend and expand, anyone can provide and deliver an additional functional module that can be an integral part of the FIYU platform. That is, I’m sure you’ll agree, a great benefit for any SaaS or PaaS solution.
Full Code RAD approach
And finally, we believe our biggest benefit – the full-code approach. Why is all this so important? We think that this approach offers many benefits, and the most important are:
Standardized development – using mainstream technologies such as Spring Boot and Angular, we provide standardization in the development process. Stability, usability, and large community for the above-mentioned technologies give us the right to think that this technology stack will be available for many years to come.
Accelerated development – If we code from scratch, we cannot speed up development at the lowest level. If we use our tech stack wisely and incorporate all their benefits, then we can greatly improve. Using prepared code templates, using prebuilt components, modules, etc., we can speed up development significantly. Also, without good coding practices, design patterns, and best development practices, we cannot hope to achieve the benefits we are aiming for.
Fast onboarding of new developers – Without proper documentation, we are lost no matter how straightforward any project is. Documentation is the keystone of any project, and that is not debatable. Having that in mind, we are dedicated to creating and maintaining documentation that fully covers every aspect of development and enables new developers a fast and fairly easy start with FIYU. For everything else, there is full support from our FIYU core team.
Conclusion
At the conclusion of this article, I must recapitulate and mention the three most important benefits that FIYU provides for our clients:
Reduced cost – As I said earlier, with built-in modules and ready-made PaaS, we can reduce the cost of development by up to 80%. We proved that to ourselves; now, we would like to prove the same to you.
Shorter time to market – Without a doubt, we proved to ourselves that FIYU significantly reduces time to market. In today’s world of startups and MVPs, FIYU can deliver proof of concept solutions or minimum viable products in no time simply by using the benefits of fully prepared and functional modules and out-of-the-box PaaS.
More time for business domain development – With FIYU, we can focus on important things from day one, and that is solving business problems for our clients and our internal projects as well.
