FIRST IMPRESSION
Let's talk about Mendix World 2021. Last year Mendix introduced the "All-in-one low-code" vision. Now the time has come for Mendix to show the next steps in implementing this vision. Last year they introduced many essential features: DataHub, Workflow, Progressive Web Apps, AI-Assisted development, git support, and visual merging.
This year's theme is about: "You assemble it, extend it, customize it, and share it with the world." Mendix also shared their vision 'Assemble all Makers' connecting Business to IT and IT to consumers. Imagine a world where all consumers can contribute to application development.
An overwhelming number of amazing features were introduced.
ADAPTIVE SOLUTIONS
The biggest game-changer for Mendix and its partners will be adaptive solutions bringing the possibility to share and re-use solutions for third parties.
Building adaptive solutions are challenging. The Mendix platform has always been strong for building projects from scratch and even complex SaaS solutions. An untouched market is the adaptive solutions. An adaptive solution is an application built once and re-used by many customers, all running their own server while keeping the power of low code to adapt the solution to each customer's needs while providing maintainability for the publisher. This market is expected to grow enormously over the coming decade.
The keynote, with Mendix CTO Johan den Haan, showed a great journey, demonstrating the build of an application based on an adaptive solution. During the presentation, he presented many new features to support the adaptive solution paradigm.
To enable adaptive solutions, Mendix will add into the platform: Intellectual property protection, extensibility of the protected application, maintainability (distribute update centrally), without breaking customizations, and deep integration with the Mendix marketplace for metering and billing. This will motivate the partner network to build great solutions and share them. And it allows other partners to implement and extend on them. The platform's development direction will motivate the use of multiple instances of a single code base, and lesser development will be done to favor multi-tenancy applications.
The direction Mendix is heading brings tremendous opportunities for all Mendix partners. CLEVR was the first ISV partner to publish an adaptive Solution, the Product Lifecycle Management for retail and fashion.
To bring adaptive capabilities to the platform, an application core can be packed in modules that can be protected and licensed through the marketplace. The biggest challenge will be to create a balance between protected components and the ability to extending them. For now, we will see that only the data model and logic will be protected. Allowing the customer implementation to extend based on the data model through association and inheritance allows fully customize UI.
DATAHUB 2.0
The other technical highlight is the introduction of DataHub 2.0, which allows seamless integration into the application landscape. With the introduction of DataHub 1.0, data was read-only, limiting the product's use. The new capability to create, update, and delete data through the DataHub will bring back the effort to build full integrations to days instead of months. The new event-driven architecture creates endless possibilities for modern integrations in a low code manner.
The vision of democratization of software development was brought to the next level when Mendix introduced the 1 More thing. They will completely open up their development platform by allowing all developers to extend the Mendix studio Pro IDE. This will allow developers to accelerate their work with homegrown extensions and allows partners to extend the development ecosystem in unprecedented ways.
As more of our economy becomes digital, new opportunities are rising, and existing companies must evolve. This creates a huge demand for software developers. With the low code platform, Mendix developers can improve their output significantly. Companies can stay at the head of the game by enabling the business employees and consumers to contribute to building tailer fit software.
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