OutSystems One revisited

Last week I attended the second day of the OutSystems One Conference. Based on the reactions of colleagues I had chosen the most interesting day. The keynote by Oleksandr Matvitskyy (Gartner) was really food for fought. He had two messages: GenAI wouldn’t take over our work and LowCode combines excellently with current and future AI developments. The correlation between the 2 was a little bit lost on me, but it’s a comforting idea.

GenAI

Before the conference I thought the emphasis would be on 2 topics. AI and the conversion from O11 to ODC. Regarding AI I wasn’t to be disappointed.  A lot of session were dealing with AI. E.g. I  attended the session “Harnessing GenAI solutions with OutSystems for Contact Center Operations”. This was an entertaining story to enhance the productivity of Call Center employees by AI by making summaries of conversations and suggesting the follow up step. I was a nice case story which helped me to identify more areas where AI can be of use. AI shines mostly in areas where you have to extract information from unstructured data. In this case the phone/chat conversation and the manuals which describe the next steps to undertake.

Conversion to ODC

Lots of sessions were dedicated to the migration to ODC, but no glimpse of the ODC migration kit which will speed up this process considerably. There was a nice session by ITUp which  used their own tool (a precursor of the ODC migration kit?) to convert a large application to ODC. However they disclosed nothing about the inner workings of the tool. It was “sugar and spice and something nice”. By the way the migration to ODC might have been (or still is) a nice use case for GenAI. With a large set of O11 and their ODC counterparts you could train AI to do the conversion of to be converted O11 applications. The session about the co-existence of O11 and ODC applications was insightful. The main challenge is to share data between O11 and ODC applications. You can do this in 2 ways: By means of rest API’s or by using the new data fabric framework, which can combine data from different data sources in one aggregate. Personally I would go for a variant of option 1. Duplicate your data so that every application has its own data and synchronize the data by means of restful webservices. The Event-Driven Architecture with ODC was a nice recap of the possibilities of the event framework.  I would especially take to heart the recommendation to use the framework only when it offers clear advantages, as implementing  an event based approach comes with a lot of extra development effort.

Loosely coupled UI’s?

I was intrigued by the “Micro Front-Ends” part in the “Creating a Clinical System with Domain Driven Design and Micro Front-Ends part”. The micro front ends proved to be a solution for using core widgets in a loosely coupled way. These core widgets could be maintained by a separate team. The solution was based on IFrames and JavaScript which in itself is a technical feat, but looks a little bit a mosquito cannon solution. Too much work and technical investment for a minor issue. What happened to good old coordination/talking between teams?

Soap in ODC

The final presentation (Leveraging Microsoft Azure API Management for SOAP Service Integration in ODC) addressed a real issue: ODC doesn’t support SOAP services. In this insightful presentation Microsoft Azure API is used to restify SOAP services. Microsoft Azure API is used to translate ODC Rest services to the outside world as SOAP and vice versa.

Looking back at the OutSystems One conference it was an inspiring conference but sometimes I missed the technical depth.