Low-Code Development: Market Trends and iQIYI Activity Platform Practice

According to HaiBi research, China’s low-/no-code market was worth CNY 1.9 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach the hundred‑billion level by 2024, indicating rapid growth. To explore why low‑code has attracted so much attention and how enterprises implement it, InfoQ interviewed iQIYI technical expert Mu You, who works on H5 development, user growth, and the activity middle‑platform.

Forrester defined low‑code in 2014 as a technology that enables rapid application development with little or no coding. Gartner later introduced the aPaaS (application platform as a service) concept in 2017, bringing low‑code platforms into the spotlight.

From a developer’s perspective, low‑code is a new development model that abstracts business logic into reusable technical components. These components can be assembled on a visual development platform—often called a Low‑Code Development Platform (LCDP)—to achieve high development efficiency with minimal code.

Early low‑code tools were simple visual editors that generated static web pages. As business systems became more complex, low‑code evolved to handle deeper logic, data integration, and workflow orchestration.

Gartner predicts that by 2024 low‑code platforms will be used in 65 % of application development projects. The surge is driven by intense market competition, rapid business changes, and a shortage of development resources, prompting teams to seek ways to accelerate delivery.

Mu You categorizes existing low‑code products into three types:

1) Configuration‑based: business logic or page templates are expressed as JSON; editing the JSON generates new pages.

2) Component‑drag‑and‑drop: (a) basic components abstracted from business needs, allowing non‑technical users to compose pages; (b) more granular logic components that can be re‑arranged to meet complex requirements.

3) Auto‑generation: tools like imgcook that convert design drafts directly into front‑end code.

Industry classifications also include four archetypes: scenario‑oriented, product‑R&D‑oriented, platform‑ecosystem, and technology‑enablement.

Low‑code is most suitable for domains where reusable components can be abstracted from past cases, such as product introductions or activity pages.

iQIYI’s activity middle‑platform illustrates a practical low‑code implementation. The practice is divided into five stages:

1) Initial business research to assess suitability for low‑code.

2) Abstracting reusable component units from existing business.

3) Integrating accumulated components and tools into the low‑code platform.

4) Providing an editing experience that supports component composition and rendering.

5) Delivering business outcomes: generating usable pages, orchestrating logic, and enabling rapid iteration and experience optimization.

Since Q3 2019, iQIYI’s team has been building a low‑code solution for activity development. Repetitive custom development was inefficient, so the team created a library of common components and page templates, allowing operations staff to configure activity pages directly.

The platform, built with React, uses React‑dnd and React‑rnd for drag‑and‑drop and resizing. It integrates high‑frequency components such as mixed‑text layouts, lotteries, voting, comments, and video playback. Over 40 business lines now use the platform, having generated more than 4,000 activity pages in its first year, dramatically improving operational efficiency.

Three common challenges in low‑code practice are highlighted:

1) Integration with existing systems: the platform should abstract components from the current development stack and ensure seamless downstream deployment.

2) Determining which functionalities merit encapsulation as low‑code modules: typically, a complete logical unit that can operate independently is packaged as a minimal component.

3) Defining the “perfect” low‑code platform: it must be business‑driven, enabling both developers and operators to implement diverse scenarios comfortably, which requires continuous refinement.