Item: Mendix
Rating: 10
Author: Stuart Beattie

Overall Satisfaction with Mendix

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Mendix as a front-end development environment for accessing the functionality of the Exari DocGen product. We completely replace the Exari UI with Mendix pages.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Firstly it's good for rapidly developing and extending a prototype than can progress into an operational system; aka non-disposable prototyping.
Secondly it's good for developing, communicating and adapting business logic.
Thirdly it's good for being a front-end to legacy systems, databases and remote web services.
Fourthly its good for supporting team-working, agile projects, sharing and the modularisation/re-use of core functionality.

Cons

I'd like to see binary data stored in non-persistable entities.
I'd like full WYSIWYG UI development environment (and I know it's on the way).
I'd like to see Mendix integrate machine-learning into the development process and so be able to make recommendations to (particularly new) developers when it detects the development of "anti-patterns" and dead-ends: real-time QA and best practice feedback.

The two were neck-and-neck on most measures. OutSystems, at the time, had more of a WYSIWYG UI development environment. We chose to work first with Mendix because we could implement the WebService interface to Exari DocGen with less Java/C++ code than was required for OutSystems. We fully intend to develop an interface for OutSystems in due course.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's at its best for very rapid application prototyping, development, and roll-out. Use it when you need a plethora of tactical solutions, any one of which could be required to metamorphose over time into a strategic solution. It is less good, natively, for document-centric processes which is why we use it as a front-end to Exari's DocGen.

Comments

Please log in to join the conversation

Mendix as a front-end to document-centric processes