Appian's low code platform allows businesses to design, automate, and optimize their business processes. With our powerful features that unite data, process, and AI, developers can build applications that streamline your business in a fraction of the time traditional development takes.
This page will familiarize you with the entire application-building process, start to finish. Appian recommends following Agile methodologies to best ensure a swift and reliable delivery, including:
When starting a new project, you'll want to put together a skilled team and clearly define what your end product should provide for its users. Effective planning and analysis can help guarantee the success of your project.
As Appian's delivery methodology suggests, consider the following tasks:
During the design phase, developers will analyze the functional requirements determined by planning and analysis and determine the best methods of creating the application. Engage with stakeholders throughout the design process to gather feedback and be sure that the application will align with project goals. As you design, be sure to iterate on your work based on feedback so your app will be continually refined.
This phase will likely include:
Once you've determined the functional requirements of your application and undergone design reviews, you can begin building. Appian applications are made up of design objects. Each design object provides a specific piece of functionality, and each application contains many objects grouped by common purpose. This section covers several key features that are essential to developing your business applications.
Note: The features available in your environment may vary depending on your site's license, region, and compliance requirements, among other factors. Check with your system administrator to verify your Appian environment has the features you're interested in using.
Appian's data fabric allows you to unify, secure, and optimize data spread across the enterprise, so you can build applications quickly.
Data fabric is powered by record types. Using record types, you can connect to enterprise data, regardless of where it lives, easily configure security to determine who can see what data, and seamlessly reference data throughout your applications—in interfaces, expressions, process models, sites, and more.
Integrating is a fundamental aspect of data fabric and can be invaluable when the information or actions shared between systems are necessary for the functionality of your application. Consider what your motivations are for integrating.
Depending on whether you want to use another system to call Appian or to have Appian call another system, you can choose between several methods of integration. For example, you might choose to use a Web API to expose Appian data and services to outside systems. To call another system into Appian, you might configure a connected system object. See Choosing the Right Type of Integration for more guidance on choosing the right type of integration for your use case.
Interfaces are the components users interact with directly. With Appian's design tools, you can quickly create user-friendly layouts. Appian SAIL is the low-code framework you'll work in when designing and developing interfaces for your applications.
When you creating interfaces in Appian, you can work in one of two modes:
These are the tools you'll generally use when designing interfaces:
a!queryRecordType(), a!queryRecordByIdentifier(), and a!queryEntity() functions. See Query Recipes for a set of query examples you can follow along with.Process modeling is a way to graphically represent business processes and workflows. With Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) as a base, Appian's process modeling allows users to translate BPMN standard diagrams into automated processes. This gives you an easy way to monitor processes and create contextual actions from your business processes. See here for the process nodes and smart services you can use to define a process workflow.
Use Appian's methods of user management to view, create, and modify users. Keep these fundamental concepts and guidance for object security in mind to ensure that users and developers have the appropriate permissions within an application.
Appian supports several authentication mechanisms:
Note: Certain system authentication features apply only to locally managed accounts. See this table for more details.
Appian offers several ways to incorporate AI into your applications and user experiences. Learn when to use AI and machine learning (ML) and which features may meet your needs.
Portals are public web apps that can be accessed without signing in, so anyone on the web can access them. Appian's portal best practices guide shows you how to best integrate your portal with Appian's functions, components, and objects.
Robotic process automation (RPA) automates high volume, highly transactional manual processes. RPA can free up your workforce to focus on tasks and initiatives that require reasoning and human intervention.
Testing and development are often interlinked. By testing continuously throughout the development cycle, you can make sure you're fulfilling functional requirements and meeting quality standards.
When it comes to testing and validating your Appian applications, Appian supports three types of testing in particular: unit testing, UI testing, and performance testing. You'll want to thoroughly test your application before you roll it out to stakeholders and customers.
Once testing is completed and bugs have been resolved, you're ready to deploy your application. To deploy, refer to this guide.
There are three different ways to deploy updates to your Appian applications:
Once you've rolled out your application, you'll want to make sure your product continues to be high quality. Appian allows you to configure post-deployment processes as you're preparing your package for deployment. Some use cases of these processes include running expression rule test cases or triggering Jenkins jobs to automate other test scripts.
Maintenance ensures that an application can continue to meet user needs, evolve accordingly as new functional requirements arise, and keep pace with technological advancements. Monitoring provides feedback that flows back into the planning and development stages, enabling continuous improvements to your applications as opportunities for improvement and optimization are identified.
Process HQ is a workspace that allows users to explore data and get insights for how they can optimize their business. When you're building an application, you'll configure certain features that support business users in the Process HQ workspace. You'll work within the data fabric to collect and prepare data for analysis in process insights or reporting in data fabric insights:
Now that you've learned a bit about Appian, join your fellow developers on Appian Community to ask questions and participate in discussions. Check out Appian's YouTube channel to stay up-to-date with new developments and tutorials.
Appian Community Edition provides users with free and unlimited-time access to the Appian platform, perfect for learning and limited production development within the terms and conditions of the Appian Community license. If you're completely new to the platform, Academy Online has free, self-paced training and exercises to help you get familiar.
When you're ready to scale production beyond what's allowed with the Appian Community edition, Appian offers an easy way to upgrade to the full version of Appian. While the application-building guidance in this guide will be generally applicable, some of the mentioned Appian features will only be available to users with the full version.
Introduction to Application Building in Appian
