At Mendix World 2016 the latest and greatest release of Mendix is announced. In this blog I will present my view on the new features and why they are important to you and the rest of the Mendix community.
In other blogs I have addressed reducing complexity and keeping control of an app over its lifespan as one of the most important aspects of app development. If your app is here to stay, you need to keep it simple, structured and understandable.
SIMPLICITY PERSPECTIVE
I’m glad to see Mendix addresses complexity in several ways:
- By offering standard integrations to cloud solutions for IoT, Machine Learning, Big Data and more, from parties like IBM, Amazon, KPN and soon Microsoft.
- By making integrations easier than ever by adding a connector kit, so the AppStore will soon literally overflow with connectors, by adding native rest besides web services, and by adding a database connector.
- By making the experience of Mendix mobile Apps better than most native mobile apps because of the neat device integration all the way to push notifications, smart sync and native share and the before mentioned integrations into IoT, machine learning and big data.
- By a giant step in developer experience with the ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG) design in the new web Modeler for designing great apps including UX and styling. No CSS, no trial and error, just seeing and believing. This automatically means you get faster your incredible nice looking apps. The web modeler runs on any device and by definition delivers WYSIWYG on any device.
- By automating tests, as I’ve mentioned in other blogs, so you can do continuous integration and keep up with all ideas, keep the app-train moving and still ensure quality.
- By delivering a tool to analyze usage and performance, so great apps can scale.
QUALITY PERSPECTIVE
Looking from the QA perspective the list is also impressive. Off course some features are in both lists!
- Automated Testing so finally the testing can keep up with the development. By letting developers record test scripts you only need 1 test engineer per 4 developers.
- Application Performance Monitoring to support all your Mendix apps proactively.
- Application Quality Monitoring to assist you in the education of your developers, keeping your app consistent and future proof.
FUTURE PERSPECTIVE
Looking at how Mendix helps making your organization ready for the future I see
- Easy use of machine learning.
- Speech to text, text to speech.
- Big data and analytics.
- The internet of things (IoT) to support.
- Support for present and future devices (By web modeler and IoT support) with a native look and feel.
- More open than ever for integrations. This leads to a lot more AppStore additions for the community.
- Faster learning curve supported by learning programs, community, WYSIWYG, and native in microflow support for any technology thinkable.
ENTERPRISE PERSPECTIVE
With the Mendix start-structure-scale approach and the tools supporting this, enterprises can really start scaling their agile processes.
- Automated testing to ensure quality faster and cheaper.
- Quality monitoring to check quality delivered by 3rd parties, to maintain and keep an app up to date in production longer and allowing changes in the future while other (non Mendix apps) are long turned into legacy.
- Application performance monitoring to better support and maintain apps.
- Seamless scaling using cloud foundry (Mendix 6 has this already!).
- One click deploy which is faster than ever.
- Open API’s for integrations, deployment, model analysis and more…
- An AppStore with great content to allow for make or buy decisions.
- A community and easy learning curve supported by all modern ways of learning.
- Free sandbox edition to experiment all you like.
CONCLUSION
From the different perspectives you can see Mendix is accelerating app development to the speed of ideas, both supporting whatever trend is available. Making app development even faster and better suited for tomorrow’s devices and scaling their tool into the enterprise stratosphere.
I’m proud our CLEVR automated test suite (ATS) and application performance monitor (APM) are recognized as a fundamental part of this great platform. You don’t have to wait for Mendix 7 to see our two new tools in action. Contact us and we will gladly demonstrate the tools. We are convinced that they will deliver immediate business value to you.
Mendix 7 will be released October this year. As a MVP I have the privilege to try the new functionalities in the next upcoming months. I will share my experiences after using Mendix 7 in a new blogpost.
