My first experience with Mendix

Last week, I have experienced the power and creative fun of developing with Mendix. The result of this is (drum roll) the QuizMaster app! 

Have a look at the video below that shows how one person can start a new quiz, which others can join. The app runs in a web page on a laptop, tablet or phone and is fully responsive and of course it can be used as a standalone app as well. It encourages students in a class to pay attention and try to win the next session, it can turn any presentation into an interactive event and it can be fun to just play a quiz with friends, family or colleagues! 

However, this post is not about the app itself: I am fully aware that there are many apps out there that achieve the same or more. Rather this is about how Mendix helped me, a business consultant without any prior Mendix experience (other than the online learning paths), to create a fully functional, cross-platform app in 15-20 (!) hours. After the first couple of hours, the quiz management system was up and running, enabling me to create quizzes and to add, edit and delete questions and answers. After that, it took me another couple of hours to add the screens for both the user running the quiz and the participant(s). Next came features like a scoring system (based on the speed of answering), a live countdown ticker that moves to the next question automatically and the ability to manage the quizzes that had already been started. 

I have been a developer but I have not actively developed anything in years. I know my way around some software frameworks, but have always found that a framework is fine for the basic stuff but gets in the way as soon as you need something a little more complex... or the framework itself is so complex that it hardly beats coding it yourself. Granted, there hardly is any "real" complexity involved in the app, but I have not had to overcome any limits yet, the framework has helped me every step of the way. Maybe not always with components that are provided by default but there are some app store components (Microflow timer, radio button list) in my app that extended the framework perfectly and worked like a charm right after installation.

Looking forward to integrate Mendix with our existing software portfolio and I am open for feedback or questions!