Given the option to drive home from work on an 8-lane highway versus a 2-lane highway with the same number of cars on each highway, you'd choose the 8-lane, right? Of course. It's a no-brainer.
Taking that to the IT space, it seems a no-brainer to do that in IT systems. So why don't more application development teams build support for parallel processing into their corporate apps? Because it's fricken hard!
Don't believe me? There are entire courses dedicated to this topic:
Udacity Course: Intro to Parallel Programming
Geek alert! I'm about to get a bit technical here. To develop for parallel processing you typically have to manually write code in 3GL programming languages - not exactly simple. And it gets worse. As technology evolves we add more and more processing power, we've moved from 4 to 16 to 32 and nowÖ. 64+ cores! Every evolution causes a need to refactor code to take full advantage of the new processing power.
So most organizations don't optimize for parallel processing, and who can blame them? I'm excited to announce that, if you're an Appian customer, once you get on the 17.4 release you'll be coding with parallel processing - by default! That's right, we've turned the low-code industry on its head and do all of the heavy-lifting on the backend so all you have to do is develop your apps as usual and they automatically take advantage of the extra computing power available to them.
And it gets better! What if you upgrade and move from 16 to 32 cores, no problem, Appian will automatically take advantage of those extra cores with your existing code. In other words, you are future proofed!
And that's just a portion of what's coming in 17.4. Other feature highlights from 17.4 include:
- Image handling, object linking, and reference lines in reports
- Export to Excel functions and Smart Services
- New enhancements to the design environment
- Easy integration with OAuth 2.0 web services
Want to learn more about the latest release of Appian? Check out our 17.4 Product Webinar below:
I hope to see you online!
Chris Dunn, Director, Product Marketing
