Some pundits argue that every person needs to know how to code; programming is becoming as fundamental as being able to read and write.

While this might be a stretch, it is true that businesses are increasingly competing and disrupting their industries through software development; coding is definitely no longer niche.

But the need for everyone to program might not become reality; companies such as Mendix are making it easier for developers and managers alike to quickly build and deploy applications—and do it visually.

“Our platform includes a model-driven development environment, which means you build applications in a visual way,” Gottfried Sehringer told TMCnet during a recent interview, vice president of marketing for Mendix. “That's faster and easier for traditional developers as well as more business-oriented people who have a knack for IT but can also be participants in the application development process."

By making it visual and easier to put together new apps, managers and IT departments can come together more effectively and capitalize on opportunities within days or weeks of spotting them, not months. In today’s real-time economy, this is crucial.

“This is a way for business and IT to come together, understand in a visual way what's being built, collaborate on it, comment on it, make changes together, and see the effect of changes instantly," noted Sehringer.

These applications can be mobile, cloud-based or even standalone. They typically integrate with some sort of backend system to pull data.

Making it easy to roll out new applications also means that the development environment needs to be cross-platform and cross-device.

For Mendix, this also is key.

“We have a multi-device, multi-platform application,” he told us. “You build the application once, and it runs on any type of device. We include widgets that let you build native apps that use device functions like geo-location or barcode scanning. It's all HTML5-based."

And that’s the way it should be. Easy and fast.