FeiKu: Ximalaya's Low‑Code Platform for Rapid Business Application Development

Ximalaya, a leading domestic audio platform, began exploring low‑code solutions in 2016 to simplify frequent configuration changes for new app modules. Repeatedly building CRUD‑only configuration back‑ends was painful and offered little satisfaction for developers.

To address this, the Ximalaya R&D team created a generic configuration backend that required little or no code, enabling rapid deployment of new modules. This effort resulted in the product named FeiKu .

Goal

The core idea of a low‑code platform is to provide a way to describe a domain of the world through a systematic model. FeiKu’s concise mission statement was:

FeiKu’s only purpose is for users to state a requirement, then the business side can drag‑and‑drop within FeiKu to build a complete system.

Large Use Case

A business user asks for a “Team‑Building Expense” system. The product manager opens FeiKu, creates a new application named “Team‑Building Expense”, designs a form by dragging components, previews, and publishes – the system is live instantly. Subsequent requests for approval workflows, statistics, and integration with sales data are handled by further drag‑and‑drop configurations, occasional Groovy scripts, and API integrations.

Basic Capabilities

The architecture diagram (omitted here) defines the layered capabilities and module responsibilities. FeiKu supports both model‑driven and view‑driven approaches, abstracting tenants, applications, entities, fields, forms, and menus, with relationships among them. Core built‑in features include:

Permission Management : universal access control for all applications.

Workflow Engine : enables pre‑save process control.

Script Engine : allows custom Groovy scripts at specific hooks.

Task Scheduling : executes timed Groovy scripts.

External data sources can be integrated, and FeiKu exposes RPC and RESTful APIs for CRUD operations on stored business data.

Metadata

Tenants, applications, entities, fields, and forms are defined as metadata, forming the foundational structure of FeiKu. Each concept is described as follows:

Tenant : initially only Ximalaya, with plans for more tenants.

Application : each represents a business system built with FeiKu.

Entity : corresponds to a database table; entities can relate to each other.

Field : supports various types such as text, datepicker, checkbox, radio, select, hyperlink, number, etc.

Form : configures operations, list permissions, and query conditions.

Results

To date, nearly 300 applications have been built on FeiKu, primarily for internal non‑core business processes, saving considerable development effort by eliminating repetitive custom development.

Challenges

High performance and reliability requirements of core business systems are not yet fully supported. Future work includes per‑application cache configuration to improve performance.

Technical challenges faced:

Initial infrastructure constraints forced the use of MySQL with many extension columns, leading to indexing limitations.

Version 2.0 introduced dynamic MySQL table creation, which is currently being trialed.

Future Plans

Increase openness so business users can self‑service the low‑code platform.

Deepen workflow engine integration and enable dynamic data flow across departments.

Enhance performance and concurrency support for high‑load scenarios.