Build.One (formerly AKIOMA) Slashes Dev Time, Simplifies Rules Complexity with Progress Corticon.js

Build.One is the international leader in low-code/no-code application development, providing future-proof technology solutions for worldwide customers across every industry. It offers what the company considers to be THE best cloud platform for web application development, guaranteeing unprecedented productivity to its customers who range from titans of industry to federal governments, and beyond.  

As an innovator, Build.One always pushes the boundaries of low-code/no-code development. Even though its UI and UX development offerings were already market leading, and achieved through no-code tooling, BUILD.ONE wanted to take it further. Its goal was to implement the complex business logic rules that its customers needed for seamless web experiences, but do so without any coding. “When you want to control the whole UI, the hiding, viewing, enabling, and disabling a complex series of fields, every delay in response times—even half a second—is too long for users,” said Mike Liewehr, Founder and CEO, Build.One. “But we were not aware of any technology that enabled us to build such complex personalization rules and run them natively in the browser. It didn’t exist.” 

If the company was to fulfill its low-code/no-code development vision, it needed a rules solution to liberate it from hard coding the UI logic.  

A proud Progress customer for over 25 years, Build.One was a longtime user of Progress® Corticon®. The company's breakthrough in allowing it to implement even complex UI logic without any coding came when it discovered Progress® Corticon.js®. With Corticon.js, it was able to take its “no-code” offering to the next level by implementing it directly into its own framework. “We realized it was perfect because there was no server-involved deployment. We implemented it into the core of Build.One.SWAT! our low-code/no-code development platform for complex business applications,” said Liewehr.

Instead of just implementing simple apps, Build.One.SWAT! allows customers to create mission-critical business applications with sophisticated screens based on elaborate logic to intuitively guide users through their journey and prevent them from making data entry mistakes. Build.One.SWAT! enables customers to bring data from multiple systems together in one seamless user experience, guaranteeing high user adoption. By adding Corticon.js, Build.One's customers could design highly personalized user experiences without any lines of code. Each would dynamically change the UI elements—such as buttons, sections, menus options, buttons, could even populate fields with calculated values with filtered dropdowns based on user input and locale. The broad no-code capabilities were virtually unlimited for both the UI and the UI logic. 

Even better, the changes the team implemented wouldn’t be handled by developers at all. Business analysts were able to implement and document the no-code rules in Corticon.js, dramatically streamlining the company's process. Build.One pairs Corticon.js with a range of other Progress products to further reduce its time to market. These include OpenEdge ABL for the backend, DataDirect to tap into multiple data sources, and Kinvey for backend data integration and security. As Liewehr says, "We aim to be 10x faster than our competitors and still have a better functional result. Progress helps us accelerate time to market when creating applications.” 

Corticon.js revolutionized the way Build.One serves its customers. The company estimates that its customers can save 90% of their previous UI logic development time with Corticon.js. The previous approach already significantly reduced development time, but now it enables another dramatic productivity boost. 

“If you code, it’s hours and hours of work, even if you have a great framework and API,” said Liewehr. “With Corticon.js, its rules can be implemented in minutes. It’s faster to implement than to write the specifications for developers to do it in a classic way.”  

The reaction has been positive, with product capabilities raising eyebrows during customer demos, “Prospects say, ‘Sure, we can create a screen if we’re the designer, but we also need logic.’ So, we just do it in Corticon, and it’s live immediately,” said Liewehr.  

The technology also fits with its many healthcare and government clients contending with complex and evolving legislative mandates, “Having all the rules in centralized rule sheets is a huge advantage. Instead of 10 or 20 source files, they open the Corticon rule sheet for a specific screen and see everything related to that. The complete transparency is very helpful.”  

But most of all, Build.One can confidently pursue its business vision, “To achieve this level of automation and low-code/no-code possibilities would simply not have been possible before," said Liewehr. “The alternative would be to code it ourselves. Now, we are absolutely sure we can leapfrog the competition in this area as well. We couldn’t have done it without Corticon.js.”  

About Build.One (formerly AKIOMA)  

Build.One Software GmbH offers market-leading opportunities to meet today’s business challenges with its cloud platform solutions for web application development. Build.One customers realize dramatic productivity gains with its low-code/no-code approach, even when crafting highly complex business-critical enterprise applications. Learn more at www.build.one.