Can Low-Code Languages be Used for Core Enterprise Applications?

Low-code platforms become still more popular in Digital Transformation, mainly in the area of business process automation. This popularity arises from the fact that low-code platforms on one hand speed up the application development process and on the other hand they make the application development accessible for business users without deep expertise in information technologies, i.e. for so-called citizen developers. At the same time, there is a widely spread opinion that low-code platforms can only be used for simple applications, consisting often in only single process automation. There is a strong belief that there is a necessary trade off between simplicity and complexity - a platform simple to use cannot be used to automate complex systems. In this paper we discuss whether this is necessarily true. As the main cause for this claim we identify the lack of mechanisms for inter process relationships and inter-process communications in nowadays recognized low code platforms. Then, using low-code language Petriflow, we illustrate how such inter-process communication can be incorporated into low code platforms in order to serve for developing complex core enterprise applications consisting of interplay of many data objects and processes, resulting in so called applications based on object-centric processes.