Kill 40% Development Effort with a Node.js Low-Code Platform

Kill 40% Development Effort with a Node.js Low-Code Platform

If you've developed more than one application in your career, you'll know that there is an inevitable amount of repetition and "re-inventing the wheel" between projects. If you've never used a low code solution / advanced CMS / enterprise application development platform you might not readily agree, so please allow me to explain.

If we categories the tasks that we spend our time as developers at a high level, you may start to see this overlap.

Let's start by discussing "Grunt Work"

Grunt works tasks are the ones that we are forced to do in order to complete the project. It's not fun, it's not challenging, and we've done it a dozen times, but it's gotta get done.

If your team has a mix of junior and senior developers, it's the work that we often give to the junior devs. This isn't to say it's not important, in fact it's often critical and foundational to your app, but its not the work that requires many years of experience or deep critical thinking.

Examples of "Grunt Work" include:

• User/Role/Permissions Management
• CRUD Operations
• API Development
• Configuration Management
• Sending Notifications (Emails/SMS)
• Error Logging
• Caching
• Breadcrumbs
• Routing
• Data Entry Forms
• So much more...

And then there is the "Fun Work"

This is the challenging type of work that we actually get up in the morning for. This is were we are empowered to exercise our critical thinking, get in "the zone" and really earn those big bucks!

Examples include:

• Complex Business Rules
• Advanced UX/UI
• Deep Domain Knowledge
• Integrations With Other Services/Platforms
• Performance Tuning

So what does that all have to do with SonicJs? As web developers, we often repeat the above mentioned "grunt work" types of tasks over and over. SonicJs is a platform laser focused on the goal of categorizing, analyzing and platformizing these common tasks.

So How Does SonicJs Actually Help Minimize Time Consuming Grunt Work?

SonicJs' core is surprisingly lightweight, this is why the entire application, even with all of its core modules enabled, takes less than 2 seconds to load via "npm start".

As SonicJs goes thru its startup and page rendering processes, it emits "hooks" along the way. Modules can register these hooks and perform their own custom logic. While the event/emitter or pub/sub design patterns are certainly not unique to SonicJs, they are surprising incredible hard to find properly implemented in any CMS.

Most CMS have some sort of API enabling developers to interact with the core CMS. They are almost always, with very few exceptions, dismally limited in what you can do with them. This forces the CMS to be highly opinionated with respect to how they resolve the various functional requirements. With SonicJS, you can modify or extend just what you need without having to rewrite an entire module, or even understand the entire inner workings of the module. Moreover, SonicJs allows you to alter core functionality via your own modules and even alter other modules via their own custom hooks.

Another major distinction that goes above and beyond SonicJs' hook system, is the built in form builder. SonicJs has tight integration and has extended Form.io (https://www.form.io/). This enables developers to build a consistent administrative user experience across the entire platform. If you've ever used Wordpress, you know how annoying it is that every module/plug-in has a totally separate UI/UX which mandates a separate learning curve.

There are loads of features too, which grows every month. Whether you are building a website of any complexity, a business/consumer web application or even looking for a solid headless CMS for your module/IoT app, SonicJs may just be the platform that you've been looking for!

Business Impact

So what is the net business impact of using SonicJs? Using SonicJS CMS as your platform of choice can reduce your project's development hours by up to 40%! In many cases, event fairly complex, full featured websites/web applications with custom content types can all be generated with zero custom coding. SonicJs is a great choice for a wide array of common web development applications.

If you are curious if SonicJS might be a good fit for an upcoming project or that website your Aunt Betty has been nudging you to build for her, give it a shot! SonicJs is a Free-forever open source CMS.

If you do give SonicJS a try, please let us know how it goes. We'd love to hear from you!

Learn more: https://sonicjs.com -