Revamping Legacy Applications with Devum

The digital landscape is constantly evolving, and user expectations for applications are ever-increasing. Legacy applications, once the backbone of many businesses, can often struggle to keep pace with these changes. Their outdated interfaces can feel clunky and unintuitive, hindering user experience (UX) and impacting overall productivity. Additionally, limited scalability can restrict growth and make it difficult to integrate with newer technologies.

This is where Devum™ comes in. Devum™ is a powerful low-code development platform that empowers you to breathe new life into your legacy applications. By leveraging Devum™’s intuitive WYSIWYG IDE (What You See Is What You Get) or App Studio, you can seamlessly revamp the UI and UX of your existing legacy applications, making them feel modern, user-friendly, and scalable for the future.

The Challenge of Legacy Applications

Legacy applications are typically characterised by outdated designs, limited scalability, and difficulties in integrating with modern systems. They often fail to provide the seamless, intuitive experience that users expect today. Additionally, maintaining and upgrading these applications can be resource-intensive, making it difficult for businesses to keep up with evolving market demands.

Introducing Devum: A Modern Solution

Devum is a powerful platform designed to address these challenges by offering a suite of tools that simplify the process of modernising legacy applications. At the heart of Devum is its WYSIWYG IDE and app page builder, which enable developers and designers to create visually appealing and highly functional user interfaces without needing extensive coding knowledge.

Key Features of Devum

• Intuitive WYSIWYG IDE: Devum App Studio (Devum’s app page builder) stands at the helm of innovation, offering an intuitive What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Integrated Development Environment (IDE) allows users to design application pages visually. This powerful tool allows developers and non-developers alike to modernise user interfaces (UI) with ease and precision, reinforcing the user experience (UX) without delving into the complexities of traditional code.
  
  
• Comprehensive Component Library: Devum provides a vast library of HTML, 3D, Map-based and form components, including basic elements, advanced elements, navigation elements, charts, and section elements. This extensive selection ensures that users can create rich, interactive user interfaces with ease.
  
  

Devum's Extensive Component Library including HTML, 3D, Map, Form elements along with Widgets.

• Layout and Styling: With Devum, users can effortlessly design responsive layouts and apply custom styling to match their brand’s identity. The platform supports a range of layout options and styling controls, making it easy to create a polished, professional look.
  
  
• Animation Properties and Behaviours: Engagement hinges on an application’s responsiveness to user interaction. The depth of interactivity offered by Devum, with its styling controls and animation properties, means that users experience more than just a static page—they encounter a portal tailored to anticipate and meet their needs. Behaviours and user interaction events can be defined with just a few mouse clicks, ensuring that each click, tap, or swipe translates into a meaningful and expected outcome.
  
  
  Adding interactions to your app is a breeze with Devum.
  
  
  Easily add your required Event from the Devum Event Store without writing a single line of code.
  
  
• Widgets: Devum supports the creation and integration of various widgets, enabling users to extend the functionality of their applications. This modular approach ensures that applications can grow and evolve as needed.
  
  
  Devum's Widget Library for Personalised Private and Public Widgets.

Modernising Legacy Applications with Devum

Modernising a legacy application involves several steps, from redesigning the user interface to integrating with existing databases and backend systems. Here’s how Devum can streamline this process:

Step 1: Redesign the User Interface

The first step in modernising a legacy application is to redesign its user interface. Devum’s WYSIWYG IDE makes this process straightforward:

• Drag-and-Drop Design: Using the drag-and-drop functionality, users can quickly build application pages by placing elements from the control library onto the canvas.
  
  
• Responsive Layouts: Devum ensures that the designs are responsive, meaning they will look great on any device, whether it’s a desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
  
  
• Styling and Themes: Users can apply custom styles and themes to match their brand’s look and feel. Devum’s styling controls allow for precise adjustments to colours, fonts, icons, and other design elements.
  
  
• Beyond Basic Automation: Devum's artificial intelligence capabilities transcend basic automation. The platform harnesses the potential of AI for advanced functions such as predictive analytics and machine learning, providing intelligent insights for informed decision-making.
  
  
• Enhanced Efficiency and Accuracy: With AI-driven features, Devum enhances the efficiency and accuracy of processes. From automating routine tasks to providing data-driven recommendations, AI empowers users to make strategic decisions.

Step 2: Enhance User Experience

Remodelling a legacy application often appears daunting. Concerns over disrupting intricate systems can deter even the most intrepid enterprise from attempting to update. Devum mitigates these fears, providing user-centric design capabilities that align with contemporary aesthetics and functionality. Modern applications require more than just good looks; they need to offer a seamless and enjoyable user experience. Devum provides several features to achieve this:

• Interactive Elements: From standard page layouts to advanced navigation elements, Devum App Studio Control Library streamlines the design process, guaranteeing that the transition from the old to the new is smooth and effective. This library is chock-full of HTML Controls, such as basic, advanced, navigation, form and section elements, which can be weaved into a cohesive and responsive design.
  
  
• Animations and Transitions: Devum's animation properties take your UI revamp a step further. By incorporating subtle animations and transitions, you can enhance user engagement and create a more dynamic and interactive experience. Imagine buttons that subtly pulsate or menus that smoothly slide into view – these small touches can significantly improve the perceived responsiveness and overall user experience of your application, making it feel more natural.
  
  
• Behaviour Controls: Devum's behaviour functionality allows you to define custom actions for various UI elements. This enables you to create a truly interactive user interface. For example, you can configure a button to display a tooltip on hover, validate form data on input, or trigger a specific action when a user clicks on an element. These functionalities empower you to design a user interface that is not only aesthetically pleasing but also intuitively responsive to user interactions.
  
  
  Configuring custom actions within your app made simple with Devum.

Step 3: Seamless Data Integration – Modern UI, Legacy Power

One of the biggest concerns when revamping legacy applications is maintaining functionality and data integrity. Devum seamlessly addresses this concern. Its integration capabilities allow you to connect your modern UI, built with Devum, to your existing backend systems and databases. Devum excels in this area by providing robust tools for data handling:

• Get Data: Retrieve data from your legacy databases and display it within your Devum-built UI. This allows you to present existing data in a modern and user-friendly format.
  
  
• Post Data: Enable users to interact with your application by capturing data through forms or other UI elements and seamlessly posting it back to your legacy systems for processing and storage.
  
  
• Data Binding: With Devum, users can bind data to UI elements, making it easy to display dynamic content. This is particularly useful for applications that need to display real-time information or interact with large datasets.
  
  
  A glimpse to show how data source binding is just a matter of selecting the relevant fields from a drop-down list.
  
  
• Extended Connectivity: One of the hallmarks of modern applications is seamless data integration. Devum App Studio isn’t just a surface-level tool – it’s a gateway to robust backend functionality. The platform’s widgets and comprehensive data management tools provide capabilities such as Data Binding, Events Manager, Conditions, Behaviours, and Domain Services enabling real-time data flow from existing databases and applications into the newly designed interface. Devum supports integration with various APIs including REST besides MQTT, FTP/SFTP, HTTP/HTTPS, LoRaWAN and many more, enabling applications to leverage external services and data sources. This extends the capabilities of the application and opens up new possibilities for functionality.
  
  
• The Scalability Advantage: Devum's low-code approach not only simplifies the UI/UX revamp process but also lays the foundation for future scalability. As your business needs evolve, you can easily extend the capabilities of your application using Devum's development features. This allows you to integrate with new technologies, add new features, and adapt your application to changing user requirements without extensive rewrites of your core legacy code.

Modernising Legacy Applications with Devum

Let’s consider a practical example of how Devum can be used to modernise a legacy CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application:

The Challenge

A mid-sized company relies on a legacy CRM application that was built over a decade ago. The application has a dated interface, lacks mobile responsiveness, and struggles to integrate with modern data sources. The company’s goal is to revamp the CRM to improve user experience, enhance scalability, and add new features.

The Solution

Using Devum, the company’s development team undertakes the following steps:

1. Redesigning the UI: The team uses Devum’s WYSIWYG IDE to create a new, modern interface for the CRM. They incorporate responsive layouts and apply the company’s branding through custom styles and themes.
2. Enhancing UX: Interactive elements such as dynamic forms, charts, and dashboards are added to improve user experience. Animations and transitions guide users through the application, making it more intuitive.
3. Integrating Data: The team utilises Devum’s data handling capabilities to connect the new UI with the existing CRM database. They set up data bindings to display customer information and use API integrations to pull in additional data from external sources.
4. Extending Capabilities: To add new features, the team leverages Devum’s widgets. This includes integrating a live chat widget for customer support and adding advanced search functionality.

The Result

The revamped CRM application boasts a modern, responsive interface that delivers a significantly improved user experience. The seamless data integration ensures that the application works flawlessly with the existing backend, and the new features enhance the overall functionality. The company is now able to scale the application more efficiently and meet the evolving needs of its users.

In Conclusion: Devum - Your One-Stop-Shop for Legacy Application Revamp

Modernising legacy applications is essential for businesses looking to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape. Devum offers a comprehensive solution for revamping traditional applications, making them more scalable and extending their capabilities. With its intuitive WYSIWYG IDE, extensive control library, and robust data integration features, Devum empowers developers and designers to create modern, user-friendly interfaces with ease. By leveraging Devum, businesses can transform their legacy applications into powerful, scalable tools that meet the demands of modern users.

Try Devum™ today and experience the transformative power of Low-code Application Platforms!

For more information on how Devum can help modernise your legacy applications, visit Devum’s Page Builder and explore the Devum Documentation. If this sounds exciting, please claim your Devum FREE Trial.

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