Department of Computer Science and Engineering
In this project, we attempt to create a no/low-code solution for engineers to create backend web servers. With this product, development teams can collaborate, build and maintain RESTful APIs using only a GUI interface. During the development of this project, numerous startups came to the mainstream such as Autocode which promises “[to] combine a web IDE, always-on hosting and a standard library of APIs to make web programming faster and easier than ever before.” While no-code startups still have hope, the research we have conducted has shown that these products may not be worth the cost of development.
While building this product, we utilized many open source technologies. The main one is the OpenAPI specification aka “Swagger.” Using this well defined schema for defining RESTful APIs is at the heart of our solution.
With our “no-code” API code generator, you can define an API and connect it to a database and build basic and extensible CRUD API on a NoSQL database. Our product has been built so that it is extensible to work with any NoSQL DB such as Firestore and MongoDB.
While our solution is functional, we have concluded that “no-code” solutions will not be acceptable for most software development teams. Because of that, any future attempts at similar solutions should be integrated within an IDE. In our opinion, the best place to start would be with a command line interface and a yaml file being the main source of input data.