A Senior Engineering Lead at Persistent Systems, Nimesh Pareek has 12 years of professional experience as a developer and engineer, including two years using Unqork. As one of Unqork Community’s most knowledgeable and active members, Nimesh has been named a subject matter expert (SME) and has earned both his Associate and Professional certificates.
Q: Tell us about an exciting use case you have built using Unqork
Nimesh: I am working on one of the biggest projects in our office, which is a patient-facing application for a healthcare client. It allows users to book appointments and schedule in-person visits up to six months in advance and also lets them schedule virtual visits. It took about six months to build the application, and we have spent the last two years iterating it continuously.
How does Unqork differ from other software development platforms you have used?
I spent nine years exclusively working with traditional development technologies, and I feel Unqork provides many advantages. For example, if you have to use an internal database in a traditional development environment, you need to create the integrations from scratch and establish connectivity. With Unqork, you just define your schema, and the rest is taken care of. You just need to set up an operation, which you can create, update, or delete—and that’s it.
With Unqork you have so many possibilities using the drag-and-drop visual environment, and that means creating or updating a configuration is not a painful task. For example, if you need to add a radio button or a checkbox, or change a radio button to a check box, it’s very fast to do so in Unqork compared to using traditional development technology. You don’t need to add, delete, or change lines of code. It’s just a simple drag-and-drop process, which saves us so much time in the long run.
Overall, Unqork requires much less time for any development task. For example, if I have to build a new functionality, it might take a month or two in a traditional approach, but with Unqork we can get it done in a ten-day sprint. That opens up many possibilities and lets you really consider how best to serve the customer.
How does Unqork benefit the business teams you are partnering with?
In today’s world, we have ever-changing business requirements. You may get a requirement today and then after pre-installing it, you may need to discard it and come up with something better. Unqork gives us the flexibility to do this and better serve the business.
Using a traditional development environment, you might spend a day or two on a requirement and then realize it’s not worth the effort. Then, you find yourself with too little time left to deliver a project in a timely manner. But with Unqork, if you have a new requirement or a request for new functionality, you can often create it in a few hours, and that even includes pushing the change live to production.
I’d add that Unqork supports integrations with the latest technologies, and even if integrations are not pre-built, Unqork makes it straightforward to connect to them. So overall, Unqork provides a very seamless experience for serving our business partners.
And how has Unqork helped you better serve your healthcare clients’ customers?
We’ve never had to compromise on any requirement that would better serve the customer. We have never hit a single roadblock. So, I suspect that the customers are quite happy with the features and functionalities that are being delivered. And because we can deliver on requirements easily, we have the time to explore new features and think about how we can make things even better in the future.
Security and compliance are critical considerations for healthcare organizations. How does Unqork help with that?
In terms of security, there are some very good things about Unqork, like Role-Based Access Control (RBAC). For example in our healthcare application, we have various roles, and not all roles have the same level of permissions to access the application. So, with this role-based access control, we can handle that efficiently and seamlessly.
The same is true for cloud storage. We upload images on Unqork schema, and then they’re converted to the cloud storage URLs. Again, those are not accessible to anonymous users, which keeps data confidential until users are authenticated and authorized.
RBAC helps make the process smooth and seamless. If we had to do this with a traditional approach, it would become painful to ensure this happens on every page with a flow. You would need to do a lot of manual coding, which then introduces risk in addition to consuming a lot of developer time.
“With Unqork, if you have a new requirement or a request for new functionality, you can often create it in an hour, and that even includes pushing the change live to production.”
—Nimesh Pareek, Persistent Systems
What are some of your favorite specific Unqork features and functionalities?
I really like the Data Workflow feature, but recently I have worked extensively with AWS PrivateLink, and that really stands out for me because it’s so seamless. If I have a private link created externally on AWS and just want to connect it with the Unqork’s PrivateLink setup, it takes only two or three steps, and you have a virtual private cloud set up connecting Unqork and AWS. I put AWS PrivateLink at the top of the list because I understand how complicated it would be to do all those configurations manually.
I would also say Dynamic Refresh is one of my favorites for several reasons. First, it is quite essential in improving the performance. With Dynamic Refresh, you only load the elements of a page that are required on that initial load. Then, if the user performs an action and more elements need to be loaded, they will be pulled in at that instance.
In addition to improving performance, Dynamic Refresh lets you add multiple modules in a single page without hurting performance. So, you ultimately get more flexibility in designing your application.
Do you have any best practices for using Unqork that you’d like to share with other Unqork creators?
I definitely recommend using the Realtime Configuration Analysis Tool that Unqork offers. It is quite helpful in helping ensure that best practices are being followed. I also recommend getting a report from the Configuration Analysis Tool every 15 days or a month.
Sometimes, developers just build a functionality, make sure it’s working, and forget to think about best practices. However, using both of these analysis tools really helps you to get to understand in real-time what you are building.
For example, checking the plug-in calls helps. Sometimes, developers fetch everything and then use the data workflow operation to manage the data. But from a performance point of view, that often just doesn’t make sense.
Also, only use components if you specifically need them. There’s a tendency of developers to add everything because they think they may need it. However, if you don’t really need it, don’t add it, because eventually that can significantly slow down page load times.
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