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Introduction to application development

Updated on May 31, 2022

Start building your applications in a user-friendly and seamless way by implementing low-code digital solutions. Save time when you create your applications by using templates, develop various aspects of your application by engaging collaborators with different skills and roles, and increase work efficiency by configuring your application for reuse. To meet your unique needs, use the Pega Platform authoring portals.

Application development considerations

Before you start developing your application, consider the following factors:

Your business goal
In many situations, predicting an exact course of action for application development leads to fixed and inefficient solutions. With Pega Platform, you can avoid that and instead create agile applications that adjust to dynamically changing needs. center your application development around a goal that you want to achieve to ensure that work can reach a successful resolution under any circumstances.
People in your business process
Determine what types of users need to access your application, and then define the content that is appropriate for every user type. For example, a manager might need access more features than a regular worker. Additionally, consider what communication channels, such as email or chat bot, your users might need, and what devices they use to process work.
Data in your business process
Every business case requires data to reach a resolution. Think about the information that you need to collect from users, as well as the ways of gathering data. To save time, define how you can organize and reuse data in your application. For example, instead of storing separate data objects for every piece of personal information about a user, such as a name, surname, and phone number, you can gather all this information in a personal details data object. Then, you can update or reference one data object instead of multiple different instances.
Reusable elements
You can save considerable amounts of time and resources during application development by reusing various assets. For example, if you already have an application to review loan requests, you can reuse any relevant elements to develop an application for reviewing mortgage requests, or performing other banking operations.

Authoring portals

Pega Platform offers multiple tools that you can use based on your experience, role, and level of expertise. You can use the following authoring portals to develop your applications:
App Studio
Select this portal if you are a citizen developer, front-end developer, business analyst, or data engineer. App Studio holds a great variety of low-code, time-saving solutions for you to implement during your application development. With a real-time UI design, any person that is involved in a business process can contribute to application planning and development.

For more information, see App Studio overview and Creating a Microjourney for customer success.

Dev Studio
Select this portal if you are an experienced application developer, a security administrator, or an account administrator. Dev Studio offers tools for advanced application configuration, such as versioning, rules management, or branched development.

For more information, see Dev Studio overview.

Admin Studio
Select this portal if you are a system administrator. In Admin Studio, you can monitor and manage your system resources, such as nodes and background processes.

For more information, see Admin Studio overview.

Prediction Studio
Select this portal if you are a data scientist. In Prediction Studio, you can develop, monitor, and adjust models for analyzing customer interactions and communications to predict their future behavior.

For more information, see Prediction Studio overview.

The following figure summarizes factors and authoring portals to consider before you start creating your applications:

Pega Platform ecosystem
A diagram that lists application development considerations and Pega Platform authoring portals.
  • App Studio overview

    Turn your application development into a no-code, user-friendly experience by working in App Studio. In this authoring environment, you can configure the main elements of your applications that include templates for your business processes, personas that are involved in the processes, interaction channels, and data.

  • Dev Studio overview

    Configure advanced technical options for your applications in a low-code and goal-oriented way by exploring the tools available in Dev Studio. You can use Dev Studio to save time by managing the reusable resources in your application in a more detailed way, and to configure advanced settings for applications that focus on complex or exceptional business cases.

  • Admin Studio overview

    Monitor and manage resources in your system more efficiently by using the tools that Admin Studio provides. You can use Admin Studio to access run-time information and configuration options for the resources that you create in Dev Studio.

  • Prediction Studio overview

    Prediction Studio is an authoring environment in which you can control the life cycle of AI and machine learning models (such as model building, monitoring, and update). From Prediction Studio, you can also manage additional resources, such as data sets, taxonomies, and sentiment lexicons.

  • Changing your workspace

    For the complete and multidimensional development of your application, switch from one workspace to another to change the tools and features that are available in your work environment. For example, you can create resources such as job schedulers in Dev Studio, and then manage and monitor those resources in Admin Studio.

  • Exploring application-editing mode

    Explore application-editing mode to learn about the tools and information that support application development.

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