Looking back at Mendix 9

Mendix has introduced a lot of new features and improvements in the past year. Features in Studio Pro, but also the runtime, maintenance and collaboration regarding the Mendix platform. Let's have a look back at some of my highlights of Mendix 9 before Mendix 10 is introduced later today.

UI/UX improvements

• Dark mode of course was the number one improvement from Mendix 9 that has saved significant amounts of (our) energy! Make sure you enable it if you haven’t already

• The page explorer finds those smaller elements and can select them quicker on the complex pages we build.
• The login experience now allows you to use your browser-integrated password manager and/or session as you log in via the browser.

Workflow

With Mendix 9, Workflow has been introduced, a new visual language to capture business processes. 

It comes with pros and cons:

Pros

• Quick to implement seemingly simple workflow processes that otherwise require many extra steps.
• Out-of-the-box basic workflow management in the form of a companion module called Workflow Commons.

Cons

• More complex processes require you to think out of the box as you will have to deal with the default security on the system entities related to workflow
• Having the flow logic in 2 separate ‘levels’, the microflow level and workflow level, can introduce more complexities than it helps you solve.

Theming

Theming has gone through a bit of a journey ever since Mendix was first introduced. I can remember when bootstrap was introduced and everything had to be done differently. Then we got Atlas and everything had to be refactored again. While Atlas has evolved, the maintenance of SASS has become easier with the internal editor in Studio Pro.

Pros

• The new editor allows for quick changes to the SASS
• Users new to SASS will be able to start with it quicker 

Cons

• More advanced features such as searching across multiple files are not (yet) supported
• The stylesheets are only visible when you make a module a ‘styling module’ while modular architecture tells us to leave the specific style classes with the module itself.

While loop

There have been many solutions to create custom while loops, it has been an option that was requested so many times and finally introduced with Mendix 9, and I have used it in many locations making my microflows significantly less cluttered. Thank you Mendix!

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Versus

Task queue

The Task queue is similar to but different from the process queue. It still allows you to run tasks in a separate queue with 1 or multiple threads. It also allows you to monitor by using a companion module Task Queue Helpers.

Its improvements are:

• Running tasks across multiple nodes
• Configuration all in your model
• Running and processed tasks are in separate entities which keeps the running tasks performant
• Running it is a simple extra configuration on your microflow or Java action call

The downsides are:

• All the data is stored in system entities so you have to grant administrator access to read the data for monitoring purposes or work with Java actions/Microflow data source helpers
• There is no runtime or server-specific configuration anymore. Thread count can be taken care of via a constant.

Data grid 2

Or, the Data Widgets, as there are 3 main widgets with supporting widgets included in this set of widgets. That attempt to replace the original data grid, template grid and list view widgets. 

The new widgets have some very nice features such as:

• Better prepared for responsive design
• Supporting scenarios that the old widgets never did
• Based on the new pluggable widgets platform (no Dijit or Dojo dependency)

Datagrid 2 Work in progress:

• As they are developed in an agile fashion they are still far from having all the functions that the old widgets had
• It is not yet a full replacement for all situations that the old datagrid supports. However, it is a great step in the right direction. More responsive design, supporting scenarios that the old widgets never did.

GIT

It is a bit getting used to and just as with SVN Mendix has built a layer on top of the versioning system GIT so it doesn’t always match with what is expected from native GIT. But again a step into the future which will allow the Mendix platform to build the versioning feature into functionality that will be able to support teams in their needs going forward.

Performance

A recurring theme, and usually not a conversation that is focused on a positive experience. While we all have to keep performance in mind when building our apps, the Mendix R&D team has been introducing performance issues in Studio Pro while rebuilding it onto a new framework. This has not gone unnoticed. In the last few releases, it has had a significant focus and several mentions in the release notes. However, there is still much to be done. Having to restart your modeller mid-workday because it is slowing down is unacceptable. Let's hope for the best (and keep giving them our feedback) that this improves with Mendix 10!

Custom icons

Having the ability to add your custom font-based icons instead of having to rely on hacks or the default settings will make every customer with their “special” icons a lot happier, and we devs are happy that we can just do this native now.

Multiple page parameters

A long-awaited feature that will remove a significant amount of “UI/UX” based helper logic from our domain models. Implementation initially was a bit counterintuitive but it is very nice that it is possible. 

This will give you the option to pass multiple objects to a page just as you would for a Microflow.

Nanoflow improvements

Gaining the ability to execute more functions from Nanoflows as these get introduced gradually. Including the ability to call Microflows when you have to, makes running logic in the browser easier than ever.

Concluding

Of course, this is not everything that was introduced in the past year. However, they are the ones that stood out to me and are worth mentioning. Which improvements or features did you like the most in the past year? And related to my upcoming article about Mendix 10, what are you looking forward to?

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