Low-Code/No-Code Software: The Power of Data Integration and APIs

This is the third in a 4-part article series discussing some critical features for enterprise low-code development. Data integration and powerful API are key features of Alpha Software products that make them ideal for enterprise web and mobile app development.

Enterprises in today's business world rely on big data to understand the market, their customers, and their business activity. When building enterprise apps with advanced security, data integration, and robust offline support, developers recognize that full-stack capabilities are a necessity. Alpha Software offers true full-stack support, including front end, backend, cloud capabilities, and more.

data integration and apis for low-code no-code software

As I’ve written in previous blog posts, one of the most important features in a low-code/no-code platform is the ability to connect to SQL, standard relational databases, API endpoints and web services. Most low-code/no-code platforms manage to connect to API endpoints and web services. But many leave it at that, and don’t connect to SQL and standard relational databases, or don’t do it easily.

In this blog post, I’ll delve more into what kind of capabilities any low-code/no-code platform should have to connect to SQL, standard relational databases and other data sources, and show how Alpha does a superior job than the competition.

Quite frequently, low-code/no-code platforms come with their own databases. That makes it easy to get the platforms up and working. But pretty soon, companies will come up against limits. When businesses want to do more complex things, they simply can’t do them because of the built-in databases’ limitations. So they need to turn elsewhere – SQL, relational databases and beyond.

Just making a connection to these external databases isn’t enough, though. Keep in mind that even if a low-code/no-code platform promises it can make those connections, it doesn’t mean they can do it easily. They need connectivity features like wizards and genies so that it’s simple to do it the first time, and simple to do it each time they connect to a data source. Alpha does all that and more. Other platforms don’t.

Alpha Software Offers the Best App Builder with Robust Data Connection Capabilities

Alpha Software includes many powerful tools for connecting to data, including genies that make connecting to any data source as simple as connecting to a normal web API. These kind of features are particularly important for companies that have complex data needs, and so might feel they need to have a DBA team separate from the development team. With Alpha, though, you won’t need a separate DBA team. You’ll be able to handle all your data needs right inside the platform.

Alpha includes many advanced connection features. Data can be aggregated from a variety of data sources, including SQL and no-SQL database systems and web services. Integrating data from a database or web service in Alpha Anywhere is done using connection strings. A connection string describes the type of data source and information for how to connect to the data - including where the data source is hosted and any user credentials required to access the data. A connection only needs to be created once in Alpha Anywhere and can be saved and re-used in multiple mobile, web, and desktop applications. The data source used at design time often is not the same data source used in production.

Alpha Anywhere's low-code approach allows you to quickly build fully integrated, data-driven enterprise applications that integrate with a variety of data sources and web services while still allowing you the full control offered by full-code systems.

For more details, see “Data Integration With Alpha Anywhere.”