Written by: Lynn Cadet
Edited by: Lillian Castro
TL; DR: Infragistics prides itself on equipping companies with the tools to simplify and build applications without a complex coding background. Its App Builder and UI/UX tools allow users to automate tedious development tasks and leverage drag-and-drop capabilities to bring applications to market with fewer resources and less time. Infragistics’ latest update, Ultimate 21.2, makes its low-code app-building software more accessible to developers using Angular, Blazor, React, and Web Components.
Shortages. They are among the list of things in this post-pandemic era that we could certainly do without. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, even the most ordinary of resources, such as toilet paper and cream cheese, have become scarce.
But the business community has experienced a different kind of shortage. The human assets kind. As digital transformation sweeps global markets, businesses are scrambling to stay one step ahead. But they need software development to do so. Compounding the issue is that the demand for software developers has increased above the supply.
The global shortage of software developers grew to about 40 million workers in 2021, according to Daxx. In the U.S., 1.4 million software developer jobs went unfilled in 2020, and only 400,000 graduates in that field are entering the workforce per year. A Reveal survey shows that 41% of respondents have active citizen development initiatives in place to help ease the burden. This is when business users with little to no coding experience build applications with IT-approved technology.
Building applications takes time, even more so when a company is also engaged in a laborious talent search. With the software developer talent pool shrinking, Infragistics proposes a solution that helps companies achieve their citizen development goals without relying on a high skill set or heavy training.
“Developers are a high-expense resource. If apps can be built faster, with fewer bugs, by less senior or less skilled people, everyone benefits. This is what Infragistics brings to the table with App Builder and our UI & UX tools,” said Jason Beres, SVP of Developer Tools at Infragistics.
Infragistics empowers companies to approach development with simplicity in mind. Its low-code UI/UX and business intelligence tools allow businesses to create new applications, enhance existing ones, automate tasks, and make operational decisions based on visual predictive data.
“Effective deployment of low-code tools can save an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even more by eliminating repetitive development tasks, and simplifying more complex tasks like responsive screen design, complex layouts, data operations (like CRUD), and much more,” said Jason.
Infragistics Ultimate 21.2: A UI/UX Toolkit for Every Developer
With COVID-related budget cuts and hiring taking longer than ever before, the challenge to release and develop applications in a set timeline has grown significantly. Jason told us businesses have to deliver more with less every year, and the main reason organizations choose Infragistics is for the time and cost savings it provides.
“Time savings comes from our products delivering a beautiful experience to end users, with features they expect and need, with a high-performance UX, without developers having to write the code to make it all happen,” said Jason.
The company’s latest update, Ultimate 21.2, allows users to access its App Builder in all of its top bundles, including Ignite UI and Infragistics Professional. Developers can use the high-performance WYSIWYG app builder to visualize code and configure user interface design through a simplified drag and drop approach. The toolkit is now available for Angular and Blazor apps, with Web Components and React coming in H1 2022.
“On top of that, we delivered significantly more capability in the Blazor and Web Component products, with around 20 new UI controls, some key feature enhancements to the Data Grid, and a new Pivot Grid,” said Jason.
Infragistics Data and Pivot Grids deliver on customers’ component needs and help enhance their applications. Its charts render data quickly and organized, and they visualize massive amounts of information in an interactive and near real-time design.
The Slingshot and Reveal platforms also help companies retrieve data visualization of their operations to improve team productivity and business decisions.
“We also continue to keep a lockstep with Google on the Angular releases, shipping Angular 13 versions of our Angular product, which includes the best data grid in the market plus about 70 other UI controls,” said Jason.
An Unshaken Commitment to Performance, Quality, and Features
Jason said the Infragistics development process prioritizes customer needs. While Infragistics keeps up with industry trends, its development is 100% customer-driven.
“For example, we are building new UI controls for a new framework, like Blazor. We hear from our Windows Forms and WPF customers that they are moving to Blazor, and they expect the same feature capabilities as their customers have grown to love from our Windows Forms product,” said Jason.
Infragistics’ job is to deliver those experiences on the new platform, whether verbatim or reimagined to leverage the new framework’s capabilities. Jason said all of Infragistics’ features go through a UX process to explore possibilities and improve the experience for developers and their end users.
Jason said Infragistics always had the goal of delivering “the fastest grids and charts on the market in every platform.” It also sets out to exceed customer expectations in performance, quality, and features, helping the company retain many of its customers for more than 20 years.
“What we’ve focused on in the last five or so years is tying together the UX and UI tools with a common design system, and with that, ‘the glue,’ which is the App Builder and its Common Application Model, which connects the design system with the UI controls for all the modern platforms,” said Jason.
By combining these features, Infragistics can make any design appear as a high-quality, production-ready code. This solution allows companies to create designs independently of their development teams and then bring them together at the final assessment point.
“If we can deliver on innovation, as well as modern experiences for developers coming from other platforms, or even new developers, we are doing well in our customers’ eyes,” said Jason.
How Infragistics Continues to Simplify Coding for Customers
Infragistics continues to make adjustments and release updates to boost performance for its customers. By making its software tools turnkey, users attain the capabilities to quickly build models and access data charts on hand.
“With our product, they get all this capability on day one and can eliminate all the potential UX issues, bugs, and development delays. They can focus on their domain logic — what they are good at — and we are their UX / UI development team for the front end,” said Jason.
Infragistics handles the legwork that goes into implementing design and completing the development. It also provides automatic upgrade processes for Angular apps by shipping upgrade schematics. This way, users don’t have to partake in months of manual code-tinkering to complete an update.
Jason said the company does ROI studies to show how UI/UX tools help customers save time and money. By implementing its user-centric design approach, companies can save more than $1 million on large projects and drive up customer satisfaction by more than 40%. And the Infragistics team continues to push forward to deliver more customer needs.
“There is a lot to be excited about in 2022! We are pushing more and more features in App Builder that will continue to eliminate the number of code developers need to write in their applications,” said Jason.
Infragistics plans to release new features, including Swagger support with full CRUD code generation, more templates and layouts for screen design, more customization and configuration for Grids and Charts, and more language support, such as Web Components and React.
“For pure UI components, we are shipping a new Pivot Grid and new Schedule UI as well as 100% parity in Grids and Grid features across every web platform. We also see a huge future in Blazor for developers moving from legacy desktop platforms to a modern .NET-based web platform,” said Jason.
