Mendix has taken the software development world by storm. This low-code application development platform features the latest technologies and integration capabilities, accelerating the digital transformation journey. Rather than having a technical coding environment that only expert developers can navigate, Mendix operates in a visual, model-driven integrated development environment (IDE). Therefore, regardless of their development skill level, people can develop high-quality, value-driven applications with Mendix.
Mendix services helps you outpace your evolving business needs. But what makes it special? And how has it changed the world of software development? Stay glued to find out.
Key Features of Mendix
Mendix is equipped with numerous features to help you accelerate your digital innovation and transformation journey. Some key features include:
Visual Modeling
As initially stated, Mendix uses a model-driven development approach, eliminating the excessive reliance on technical manual coding. This low-code platform offers built-in visual models for defining an app’s data, user interface, and business logic, among other elements.
App Store
The Mendix low-code solution is integrated with an app store known as the Mendix Marketplace. This marketplace has numerous components designed by both Mendix developers and the community. These components include templates, plug-ins, connectors to the latest technologies, and widgets, which you can reuse when building your enterprise applications, significantly reducing the time-to-market.
Cloud-Native Deployment
The Mendix platform offers flexibility to manage and deploy your apps in the cloud of your choice, including hybrid, public, and private clouds and on-premises. With Mendix, you’re just one click away from deploying your apps on the cloud.
Full Application Lifecycle Support
Mendix supports every step of the application development lifecycle, from ideation and requirement definition to deployment, testing, and maintenance. Thanks to the numerous development tools integrated within the platform, it streamlines every step of the development. As a result, it helps you deliver better applications faster.
How Has Mendix Changed the Software Development World?
Mendix has had a significant impact on the software development world. The following are the top 5 ways Mendix has changed the software development world.
1. Introducing AI-Assisted Development to Low-Code Development
In 2018, Mendix introduced the first Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted development approach integrated into a low-code development solution. The introduction of this AI-assisted development has significantly transformed the software development industry, streamlining the process.
Mendix leverages AI and machine learning, helping your development team model and deliver Mendix apps faster. The Mendix’s AI-assisted development is known as Mendix Assist. It features several capabilities that serve as virtual co-developer bots. Currently, Mendix Assist has two bots:
- MxAssist Performance Bot
- MxAssist Logic Bot.
MxAssist Performance Bot is a smart virtual co-developer bot responsible for helping you improve your application performance. It inspects your application’s project models against the Mendix platform’s best development practices in real-time as you build your app in Mendix Studio Pro. What’s more, it detects any issues in your app models, recommends the best practices to fix them, and automatically fixes them upon user acknowledgment.
On the other hand, MxAssist Logic Bot guides you through application logic modeling and configuration. This AI-driven virtual co-developer bot provides a real-time, context-based list of the next best steps depending on your application logic and other context-related data.
2. Embracing Security by Design
Unlike most low-code application development platforms, the Mendix platform is designed with security in mind. It boasts out-of-the-box security measures that protect it against many known threats, such as broken authentication, CSRF, XSS, and SQL injection. Also, it protects logs-related activities throughout the application delivery cycle, ensuring compliance with user requirements for auditability.
This low-code platform’s security features give you the ultimate peace of mind when building your applications. For instance, your developers can enable the two-factor authentication feature, configure access rights for your files, and define password policies. Also, the Mendix platform’s user management and provisioning service grant administrators control over role-based user permissions.
Therefore, this platform has eased user management and ensured an end-to-end security mechanism where users don’t need to worry about possible attacks during the development process.
3. Integrating Cloud-Native Deployment
Software development and deployment have been one of the most challenging aspects of the industry. Fortunately, Mendix has simplified everything by embracing a cloud-native application deployment approach.
All applications built with Mendix are, by default, cloud-native, portable, and containerized. As a Mendix developer, you can deploy and scale wherever you want, from public, hybrid, or private clouds to on-premises. As a result, Mendix applications benefit from cloud interoperability, CI/CD support, low infrastructure requirements, auto-scaling, and auto-provisioning. Deployment is faster and takes just a few clicks without the need to undergo a bureaucratic process.
4. Integration of Agile Best Practices into Low Code
It’s no secret that relying on the traditional waterfall application development method is costly and poses a high risk of uncertainty. Also, it’s unsuitable for ongoing projects, which most businesses engage in. The Mendix platform recognized these shortcomings and integrated a more advanced and flexible approach and tools to support agile development and continuous improvement.
This low-code platform allows you to easily manage projects, thanks to the built-in agile project management tools, such as Scrum and Kanban. Using these tools, you can build, refine, collaborate, and prioritize user stories using conversation threads. These agile tools promote team collaboration in application development, yielding better results.
5. Automated Testing
Testing is one of the most time-consuming phases of the software development lifecycle, especially if done manually. This is because rigorous testing is required to ensure that all features and logics function as they should and are ready for use by the final user. Fortunately, Mendix offers comprehensive extension points and toolsets to establish quality assurance through test automation.
With Mendix, you can automate all your functional tests for the user stories you’ve developed. This reduces the overall testing cost to below 10% of the project budget. The platform’s Application Test Suite provides tools for embedding testing into your app development cycle, easing the testing process.
Closing Thoughts
Mendix has significantly transformed the software development sector thanks to its advanced features. From introducing AI-assisted development to automated testing, this low-code development solution accelerates your digital innovation and transformation journey by a considerable margin.
