Development environments are combined tools for the development of software, which usually work together. For integrated development environments also the term "IDE" (Integrated development environment) is common. They contain a program collection for the software development, so that the software development can take place by programmers without medium breaks. IDEs consist mostly of the components Compiler / Interpreter, editor and/or text editor with code formatting e.g. Syntax highlighting, Debugger, Linker, etc.. Extended IDE functions are e.g. the version management, the project management or the UML modeling.
Low-code development takes place as with conventional programming by hand, in an integrated development environment. In contrast to conventional programming environments, low-code platforms use only prefabricated standard software modules. Without time-consuming programming, web and mobile applications can usually be developed quickly. Integrated development environments are available for most programming languages and platforms. For the development of software and programming, the IDEs offer workload reductions by combining work steps and, for example, auto-completion and code refactoring functions. Meanwhile, there are also already development environments and low code platforms in the cloud. This has the advantage that the download of larger software packages is no longer necessary and several developers can work on a document at the same time.