RAD moved on. Our notion of rapid application development tools in pre-millennial times was typified by an era of reference architectures, componentized code constructs and shortcut templatization tools designed to make developers’ lives easier. RAD tools still do that, but the wider move to AI-enriched technologies now moves the game onward an additional step.
Working to establish itself in the post-neo RAD era is WaveMaker. The company’s “modern acceleration platform” now features WaveMaker AutoCode, an AI-powered plugin for the Figma universe that produces what the company lauds as “pixel-perfect” front-end components.
What the Figma?
As a reminder, the Figma design web-based tool is used to create a user interface (UI) or user experience (UX) design that allows users to create, share and test designs for websites, mobile apps and other digital products. In this toolset, developers and application presentation layer designers can find Figma Slides, a slide deck creation tool for presentations and FigJam, a software service that allows users to create online whiteboards that feature collaborative interactivity for others to take part.
WaveMaker says that software teams using AutoCode go from design to development by converting Figma UI designs (within minutes, it is claimed) into fully functional design components, layouts and styles for further development. This new release works out-of-the-box for Figma designs that make use of the Material 3 design system but can be enabled to work with client-proprietary design systems. Introduced in late 2022, the Material 3 design system features ready-to-use UX building blocks and a library of connected components and styles.
Poised Pixel-to-Pixel Perfection
“WaveMaker AutoCode is a game-changer for application development teams battling with the twin challenges of increasing velocity to the business while striving to deliver applications that are pixel-to-pixel matched with designs,” said Vijay Pullur, Co-founder and CEO at WaveMaker. “By integrating AI-powered automation into the design-to-code process, we are enabling teams to produce cross-platform, enterprise-grade apps with unmatched efficiency and scalability.”
Included here is a design-to-UI conversion function to translate Material 3-based Figma designs into production-ready code. Automatic component detection identifies design elements like forms, lists and cards so that the platform can then map them to corresponding widgets within WaveMaker Studio. Developers can drag-and-drop UI widgets to compose applications using the platform’s widget library while conforming to the company’s Wave design language system.
CEO Pullur says that WaveMaker AutoCode is a Java-based full-stack developer platform that generates real code, has zero lock-in, and uses a developer seat licensing model. It provides enterprise developer teams with a formal design-to-code workflow. It works alongside the company’s WaveMaker CoPilot AI-powered assistant. Found in the platform’s developer studio, the assistant enables prompt-based automatic UI customization functions.
Deeper Feature Set
Other key features found here include design language consistency i.e. WaveMaker AutoCode supports Figma variables, modes and design tokens, maintaining the integrity of the original design throughout the development process. The tool’s generated code can be customized to add business logic in WaveMaker’s studio environment making the handoff to the front-end engineering teams easier.
This platform also offers enterprise-grade (WaveMaker calls it “battle-tested”) instances of Angular code (React Native for mobile) with built-in support for authentication, authorization, internationalization and continuous integration & continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines.
As already noted, WaveMaker AutoCode conforms to the Material 3 design system out of the box, but the company insists that it is easily customizable to align with any proprietary design system, offering flexibility for teams to use their unique design language system (DLS) of choice.
Why Use These Tools?
As slickly presented (pun not intended) as these UI and UX components are, the question of why software development teams would need to embrace such a visually-aligned toolset will remain, especially perhaps for the most basic application instances, say perhaps a forms-based app that might feature in a dumb kiosk and so on. WaveMaker’s justification and validation here would feature around a suggestion that its technology empowers developers with “opinionated designs” (for which we can read compelling, intuitive, or just rather nice) in the march to modernize applications en masse, standardize development processes and add business extended logic in fast-moving CI/CD environments.
