How iceluna Transforms Middle‑Office Development with a Low‑Code PaaS Platform

iceluna Product Overview

iceluna is a group‑wide low‑code development platform that provides a visual editor for building middle‑office systems. It offers three layers of positioning: a generic middle‑office construction product, a full‑link low‑code development platform, and a PaaS platform that supplies underlying building services.

Product Background

Middle‑office development in the Alibaba ecosystem suffers from scarce front‑end resources and heavy reliance on back‑end or outsourced teams. Low‑code development, which enables visual drag‑and‑drop page creation, can increase development efficiency by several times, prompting large‑scale investment across business units.

Product Positioning

Generic middle‑office construction product – a universal tool for building complex, interactive middle‑office pages.

Full‑link low‑code platform – integrates site creation, development, debugging, publishing, and hosting.

PaaS platform – provides standardized building protocols and services, offered as either a platform mode or a middle‑office mode.

Goals

Empowerment – enable non‑front‑end developers to build pages, reducing dependency on front‑end teams.

Efficiency – lower development cost and improve productivity.

Building ecosystem – incubate domain‑specific construction products and a material ecosystem.

iceluna Architecture

The architecture consists of five layers: backend services (Node.js Midway), building infrastructure, PaaS services, development center, and the building product layer.

Infrastructure Layer

Provides a building description protocol, low‑code editor, plugin ecosystem, and material ecosystem.

PaaS Service Layer

Offers a runtime environment for the editor, ensuring isolation, real‑time debugging, and multi‑branch collaboration.

Development Center

Includes site center, application center, material center, and data center, supporting role‑based permissions such as site administrators and application administrators.

Core Infrastructure Construction

Key capabilities include a standardized building description protocol, a modular low‑code editor ecosystem, multi‑technology‑stack support (React, Rax, Vue, mini‑programs), and a material market that enables low‑cost component integration and reuse.

PaaS Platform Services

Editor Customization

Supports layout, theme, and plugin customization, allowing each site to have its own editor configuration.

Cloud Build / Publish / DB Storage

Transforms schema generated by the editor into source code, stores it in a database, pushes to GitLab and CDN, and supports one‑click deployment.

Collaboration and Multi‑Branch

Implements WebSocket‑based file locking for real‑time multi‑user editing and optimistic locking for branch management.

Code Rollback

Allows rollback to any commit hash by synchronizing fragmented schema data with Git repositories.

Performance Measurement

Uses the Holsted software complexity model to estimate development effort from schema complexity and compares it with actual logged development time to calculate efficiency gains.

Conclusion and Outlook

While iceluna has achieved significant empowerment and efficiency improvements, further gains require model‑driven or AI‑assisted low‑code techniques and expansion of domain‑specific construction products. The goal is to evolve iceluna into a high‑productivity PaaS platform for middle‑office development.