The Big Five of Mendix 10: Our top five features
The King of Low-Code returns with a new major release
On June 27th 2023, Mendix announced and revealed the latest version of the Mendix platform; Mendix 10. In this blog we’d like to share with you the features we’re most excited about in this new release!
Mendix 10 is here!
Mendix 10 is another major release of the Mendix platform and is packed with new features, enhancements and exciting additions! These features not only make the life of developers easier, but add tons of possibilities to create awesome new applications.
Let’s start with a banger: You can download Mendix 10.0.0 directly from Mendix Marketplace!
Download Mendix 10 HERE!
Table of Contents
It was not easy creating the list below of the most exciting new features, but this is what we think are game-changers, and we’d like to explain why:
- The Lion (The King of Features) – Extensibility Framework
- The Elephant (Huge and often requested) – Native Mac version of Studio Pro and Improved PDF generation
- The Rhino (Features that are a rare sight) – Solutions Kit
- The Leopard (Spotless execution features) – Improved External Connections
- The African Buffalo (We’ll let you figure this one out yourselves) – Business Events
The Lion – Extensibility Framework
The Lion, also known as the King of the Jungle or in this case, the King of the new features, has to be the Extensibility Framework. Mendix Studio Pro is already a great IDE to work in and keeps getting better, but wouldn’t it be awesome if you could extend the Mendix Studio Pro IDE with components you deem useful, and think other developers might find useful as well? Well with the Extensibility Framework, you can!
You can create custom extensions in C# or TypeScript and have it seamlessly available in Mendix Studio Pro. Two of the extensions that were shown was an extension to view a call hierarchy of your microflow, and the ability to easily create tests from that extension. Another extension shown was an integration with AWS Lambda!
The Elephant – Native MacOS version and PDF Generation
Ok ok, a little bit of cheating going on here, but nevertheless both of these are huge features! Announced during the reveal was a native MacOS version is in the works. Great news for all those Apple users out there, and a quick browse of the forum will tell you there’s a lot of them out there! No more Parallels soon(ish?).
Another massive improvement that needs mentioning in this category and pretty sure 99,9% of the community is in agreement over this one, is the improved PDF generation. PDF Generation in Mendix has always been a touchy subject within the community. It’s often requested as a feature of an app, but the availability of generating rich PDFs from Mendix was a bit underwhelming to say the least. It was a component of the platform that was a bit left behind in terms of the capabilities of the Document Template for example.
Well NO MORE! The new Document Generation Module uses a page to generate a PDF from; build a page as you would normally, and use the supplied ‘Generate Document’ action to create rich and beautiful PDF documents!
The Rhino – Solutions Kit
The Solutions Kit is a set of functionalities you don’t see too often, just as the rhino nowadays unfortunately. However it’s still a force to be reckoned with! The Solutions Kit is a a set of capabilities to take your Solution to the next level. One of the main features of the Solutions Kit is IP Protection and Protected Modules.
You can now set modules as Protected Modules. This makes a module immutable and even hiding certain functionality from other parties using your solution. With this capability you could create the core of a solution, protect the required modules, and have different instances of the solution build custom functionalities on top of that core, without being able to change it. Having this immutable core allows for updates of the core application without the risk of major conflicts while upgrading the other instances.
The Leopard – Improved External Connections
This may not be the biggest new feature or pzazz of Mendix 10, but this feature is spotless . There already was an improved interface when developing REST services compared to the need of the REST Services module. Do you remember that module, which was basically a set of Java actions? This is just a step up – again.
The Database connector shown in the reveal was just everything it needs to be. Test your connections, test your queries, automatically create the required entities based on the response etc. Just great! Not to mention the improvements made to the Interactive REST Collection. Pretty sure this is going to save a bunch of time (and probably some headaches here and there as well).
The African Buffalo – Business Events
The African Buffalo, or Syncerus Caffer in Latin, just has to be the Business Events feature Andrej Koelewijn talked about. We’ve all been there; an app landscape and somewhere, something changes. You want all your connected apps to be in sync (you get it?) with the changed data. Boom. Events. Create an event that is triggered when “X happens”, let your other apps subscribe to that event and run a microflow (or whatever) based on that event.
Honorable Mention – Generate Validation Microflow
Who likes building validation microflows anyway, right? Now, you don’t have to anymore. You can have the platform generate the validation microflow for you. You even get a neat screen where you can input the attributes you want to validate and what the caption of the decision split should be. Only thing left to do is change the name of the generated microflow to have the correct syntax 😉.
Conclusion
Obviously there’s much more out there and if the previous release cycle of Mendix is any indication, there will be a lot more neat features during the course of Mendix 10, but everything announced during the reveal was already huge.
Please bear in mind that the features mentioned in this blog (or the reveal for that matter) might not be available in Mendix 10 immediately, but will be gradually released during the course of the Mendix 10 lifecycle.
What are some of the features you are most excited about?
About the Author
Paul Ketelaars is a Mendix Expert Developer and Mendix Architect at The Orange Force. You might recognize him as one of the first Mendix MVPs, or as the co-host of the renowned A Matter of Life and Dev video series. Besides Mendix, Paul is an avid gamer (Xbox, PlayStation, PC, Switch, you name it, he has it) and home automation enthusiast, monitoring every kWh that enters, and leaves, his house.
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