At Entando, we believe the future of application development is composable. The businesses that will achieve the greatest innovations in the coming years are those that create organizational structures and application architectures that are derived from interchangeable building blocks. 

Once those building blocks are defined and created, they are ready to be integrated into the greater whole. 

In this blog series, we are discussing Entando’s fourfold vision for application composition. The four phases of application composition are: creation, curation, composition, and consumption. We will now turn our attention to composition. 

At the composition stage, enterprises create composable applications by pulling the necessary building blocks from the curated hub and integrating them based on their prerequisites and the given needs of an application. As we explored in the previous post, enterprises may pull from one or more hubs to bring together components and business capabilities that will become user facing applications.

Developers working on composition are responsible for delivering user interfaces and experiences that will be enjoyed by the end user, whether that user is an internal business user or an outside client or customer.

Composing and Reusing

By having a strong curation team, your enterprise can more quickly and effectively compose new applications based on work that your creation team has already completed. By building applications as discrete building blocks with well-defined requirements and prerequisites, you can more effectively leverage code reuse across multiple projects, pulling functionality from private or public hubs and composing them into applications. 

With the Entando App Builder, this process is streamlined, taking out much of the guesswork of how these different components will be stitched together in the final view, and allowing for members of the team with varying levels of expertise to engage in the process.

Once composed, the different parts of your application pages will be able to pull from different sources, whether displaying data, content, or widgets within a defined page or content template. Further, each of those sources can be updated independently from the rest.

Benefits of an ACP: Low Code vs. Pro Code

By taking a composable approach to application development, enterprises are able to bridge the gap between IT and business. So rather than being truly low code, which limits customization and deployment options, composable development is “pro-code,” which means it is based on human-readable and editable source code. This leverages the skills of IT and maximizes business effectiveness through full customization and minimal technical debt. 

Further, those who assemble applications via the Entando App Builder essentially do so with a low code experience. Thus, enterprises are able to get all the customization and ownership afforded to those who create their own components, while also allowing less technical users in the organization to have meaningful control over the applications they or the end user will be interacting with.

In the final part of this series, we will explore how your application is consumed, and how that consumption team feeds back into the process of continual innovation in the three stages that came before it.

Build modular applications on Kubernetes with Entando ACP.

If you run containerized deployments, you understand the benefits of Kubernetes. You also understand how complicated it can be and how difficult it can be to gain developer adoption. It feels like there should be an easier way. 

That’s why we created an application composition platform that makes it easy to build enterprise applications on Kubernetes using modular components.

Entando ACP is changing the way enterprises think about building their apps, sites, and portals in order to promote developer productivity in a Kubernetes environment. 

With Entando ACP, you can:

• Bootstrap an application from a customized template.
• Accelerate app development to update iteratively.
• Simplify deployments by abstracting the complexity of Kubernetes.

We integrate trusted open source technologies and extend their functionality to give you a cohesive and streamlined developer experience with easy-to-use patterns. From deploying on Kubernetes to creating modular backend and frontend architectures using your current technologies, Entando helps you at every layer of the stack. 

Entando is open source with available enterprise support and services. Begin developing on the platform today, and get a quote to see how our team can help your enterprise build better apps, sites, and portals––faster.