Introduction

Like it or not, everything is speeding up in our world today. The accelerated pace has an impact on companies, business processes and the time to market of products. The change does not leave the software industry untouched either. The software industry is perhaps under more time pressure than any other industry.

As a developer, we know that creating high-quality applications takes a lot of thought and, most importantly, time. This is in stark contrast to the time pressure on developers. In addition to the fact that traditional manual coding takes too much time from developers, the risk of unwanted human error remains quite high.

The pressure of time lead to poor quality applications and missed deadlines. There is a growing demand for innovative solutions that speed up the entire software development process while also improving the quality of the result.

Abstraction is the process of discarding some unnecessary features in order to work more efficiently with the remaining ones. Through abstraction, programming languages reduce complexity and increase efficiency. Like art, software code is a representation of reality without unwanted details.

We, the developers of JUDO, firmly believe in the power of abstraction. To express our ideas in software code, we need the right level of abstraction in our development tools. If the level of abstraction is too low, too much code will be written unnecessarily, repeating the same code fragments many times. Repetition inevitably wastes time, reduces maintainability and unnecessarily increases the likelihood of errors. If the level of abstraction is too high, we cannot express the details with sufficient precision. The right choice of abstraction leads to more efficient development and better applications.

In the software industry, high-abstraction tools are now called low-code tools, because they require less (or low) code to create applications. Simply put, low-code development is a paradigm that uses models as the primary artifact of the development process, and the implementation is (semi-)automatically generated from the models. In most cases, models are created using graphical diagrams, drag-and-drop editing of boxes and playing with the connecting lines between them. Bearing the above in mind, JUDO is a low-code tool. But unlike other popular low-code platforms, JUDO is not a graphical design tool. It provides a text-based language, called JSL (JUDO Specification Language). The overall goal of JSL is to foster unambiguous and readable descriptions of applications. Because of the accuracy of JSL, models can be run, tested, and integrated into coding projects. It works with any Java backend platform, but specifically supports Spring, Spring Boot and OSGi.

What are the benefits of using plain text instead of drag and drop diagram design?

On the other hand, let’s not neglect the importance of diagrams, because a picture is worth a thousand words. Even though JUDO’s primary language is plain text, it can generate valuable diagrams.

Raising the level of abstraction also has its drawbacks. The higher the level of abstraction, the narrower the application area. So, in addition to choosing the right level of abstraction, it is essential to check whether our development tools are suitable for the target application.

JUDO is a high-abstraction level development toolbox optimized for creating enterprise applications. There are numerous definitions of what an enterprise application is. We define enterprise application as follows:

On the one hand an enterprise application is a software that runs on a remote server in a private, public or hybrid cloud. In most cases, web browsers and mobile devices are used to access the remote server over a network.

On the other hand enterprise applications are used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than individual users. Such organizations include businesses, schools, interest-based user groups, charities, or governments. The goal of enterprise applications is to improve the organization’s productivity and efficiency.

Last but not least, JUDO is not a platform, but a toolbox. A toolbox where developers can choose the tool they need and ignore the others. JUDO never forces you to change your design process or best practice, rather it gives you choices.

It is specifically designed for software developers who want to speed up their work and focus on business needs instead of typing glue codes and copying design patterns.