Accelerating Data Source Integration with CleanApps: A Low-Code Approach Using Clean Architecture and Design Patterns

CleanApps is a low-code platform designed to simplify the integration of data sources in application development, particularly within Agile Product-Based Learning (Agile PdBL) environments. In vocational education settings, many applications developed by students remain in the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) stage due to time and technical constraints, making it challenging to advance to a Minimum Marketable Product (MMP) that is ready for commercialization. A primary obstacle is the manual and time-consuming process of integrating data sources, such as APIs and local databases. This study presents a Flutter-based module designed for integrating data sources within CleanApps. It allows users to configure APIs and SQLite databases visually. The module adheres to Clean Architecture principles and utilizes software design patterns, including Strategy, Proxy, and Factory, to promote maintainable and scalable code generation. We conducted a comparative evaluation involving two approaches: five students using CleanApps and one expert developer utilizing manual coding. The SECI Note application served as a case study for this evaluation. The results revealed that CleanApps enabled data integration in an average time of 4 minutes and 42 seconds, compared to the 48 effective working hours required for the manual approach. This represents a time efficiency improvement of over 99 %. These findings highlight CleanApps' potential to accelerate product development while maintaining architectural integrity, making it especially valuable in educational and resource-constrained environments.