Mendix World – Day 2; Good bye Rotterdam

Its quite easy to assume a fandom prejudice; to praise Mendix “because we are a fan blog”, but our fandom does not stem from the fact that the product we love is called Mendix; thats mere flattery. No, it is worthy of its praise on the basis of its merit, inspiration and the motivation to make the world a better place, not by conventional means, but by the call to convert crisis into opportunity in an innovative fashion. This is how I could summarise day 2.

Mendix World 2012 concluded in excellent form, despite some hiccups from 1 speaker’s anxiety and/or health issues in a session, but reports from all the other talks and tracks were very positive and successful. Johan Den Haan gave a more in depth preview of what to expect from Mendix 5 and proves to be yet another big leap in the Mendix paradigm. The new features aren’t necessarily stuff that I would have thought of for a next release, but the more I think on it, the more I realise that those features will add a lot more than just productivity, but also greatly improve interaction in services, end user experience and interfaces. I cannot wait for the first incremental release of the product and look forward to see its arrival.

Another gem from the keynotes was Ron Tolido’s keynote. He gave a colourful talk on “Enterprise meets Agility” based on research with Capgemini and MIT, for which you can find the whitepaper here. His forward manner and ability to engage with the audience makes him a great speaker and sheds light on a few insightful challenges enterprise organisations face in a rapid changing world.

The tech tracks very interesting. Jouke, Arjan and Arjen all provided very exciting presentations. Not only could one appreciate the forethought and effort that went into making it interesting, relevant, setting the stage and expectation for Mendix 5 in more detail, but you could see that these guys think about what they do in a big way. Their inspiration and enthusiastic approach is visible to the observer. The quotes they use in their talks especially resonated with me. It wasn’t your usual off the shelf buzzword-complient help-me-sell-my-products phraseology; it was focussed, sincere, mature and visionary.

At the end of the day, mostly everybody was exhausted by 2 days’ of networking and delivering inspirational insights into Mendix. Despite that, some of the R&D team sat down with Derek Gardiner and myself and we informally interviewed them on the day to day interaction with each other and gathered some history behind Mendix. This was thoroughly enjoyable and refreshing and left us with something to remember. I wish that we could interview more of the team and hopefully we will still have the opportunity to do so in the future.

The interview and the chats we had was the proverbial icing on the cake of the conference. If we’re able to, we’ll be covering some insight into what we’ve learned there, but we just want to personally thank these guys for their time, their outstanding attitude and willingness for allowing us the chance to get to know them and would like to encourage them to continue building and delivering great software, continue innovating and cultivate the Mendix culture that makes them unique.

The Announcement of Mendix 5

One of the big points of interest at the Mendix World 2012 conference was always going to be Derek Roos’s keynote talk. The co-founder and CEO presented on the state of Mendix in the last 12 months and shared some very interesting statistics:

 

 

• 100 of the most active Mendix clients (clients that use Mendix the most) have on average 22 on going Mendix projects, up 16 from 6 last year
• 4219 questions were posted on the Mendix community forum in the last 12 months – over 50% are answered under in under 16min indicating a very healthy committee
• Over 2000 companies are currently using the Mendix cloud

Further more Derek formally announced Mendix 5. While no release date was given what is clear is that there is a concerted effort to make the Mendix experience consistent primarily through 2 major features of the Mendix 5 platform:

1. Single sign-on between running instances of Mendix applications
2. A new UX template solution designed to allow modellers to create unique and consistent look and feel across many different devices

This morning Johan den Haan will be giving his talk and showing us more of the future and Mendix 5. We’re looking forward to hearing his roadmap and seeing more of Mendix 5.

Mendix World – Day 1

MendixWorld it turning out to be an event that exceeds my expectations. Everything from the Derek Roos’ keynote up to the party, the organisation and execution was done with class and in good style and is a testimony of the Mendix culture. Its encouraging to witness this firsthand and see all the other partners and members of the Mendix eco-system.

Everything went smooth except for the usual WiFi failures that occur during demos at big events as with the launch of the iPhone 4. We can always expect that Murphy will attend our tech conventions even if he didn’t officially receive an invitation. Other than that the rest of the convention made me think I was attending a TED talk for my job.

Attendance was very high; over a 1000 attendees registered; thats a huge turnout and was visible. The number of people you meet at such an event makes a person’s finitude a sobering realisation. My brain is still whizzing with info.

One thing that is certain though, is that while we engaged with so many diverse individuals in such a short time span, I found engaging with the R&D guys to be a singular inspiring experience. We hope to give more insight into their world in the near future. From the modeler guys, to the business server guy, front end experts and QA process guy, business engineers, tech sales people, support and many others (who all have names btw) each giving amazing insight into the workings and the history and structures behind making an excellent product a reality. Its delightful to be associated with passionate and competent people with a sense of wonder and a sense of humor in your field of work. My only hope is that they retain their culture as the company grows.

We’re looking forward to tomorrow’s line-up and attending some workshops and other sessions.

Oh and there is one more thing: I’m looking forward to Mendix5. The best thing to happen to Mendix since Mendix 😉

Epic Mendix 4 Release

May the 4th be with you came and went, and though it seemed to be a fitting date for the announcement of the next version of the Mendix modeler, it came today none the sooner and promises to be yet another smashing release.

We were provisioned with a courtesy copy of the beta, and it is absolutely packed with features. It hallmarks an array of productivity enhancements and new technology, including the ability to develop mobile-based web forms. Its one of the major highlights of the new release but in no way overshadows the countless other tweaks, enhancements and new features included with the new modeler. We find the new additions very welcome and timely, since we’re already benefitting by it in a big way.

It’s epic feature discovery and has the same kind of excitement that accompanies a new release of a Star Wars episode; for those who are fans. We won’t be covering everything in a single post, its too much to cover, so we will attempt to uncover some, if not all of the new features, in the weeks to come.

Grab some popcorn and enjoy our little fan “film introduction” we made for the Beta and go grab the Modeler and see what you can find out!

Mendix Spring 2012 Release

Today was a lot like when the Apple Online Store is down and the famous yellow “We’ll be Back Soon” sticky gets some web-time. It was a morning of click refresh until at last the site was back up.

After snapping out of the hypnotic effect that the new Mendix website had on us, we managed to log in and notice a huge overhaul of pretty much everything. The Public Facing website’s change is welcome. It looks inspiring and takes the game up a notch. Its not just a pretty face though; there are a lot of substantial changes inside too.

It boasts a unified platform, integrating Sprintr™ and the cloud portal into 1 unified experience. The forum still seems to be a separate entity though, but all the other portal bits and pieces are being fused together. The first thing that caught my eye after I logged in was an IM chat widget in the right bottom corner of the portal and an improvement to the layout. It feels more like an app now and looking for “the old stuff” is feels a bit like finding easter eggs.

Most importantly is the new platform. Mendix 4 has a lot of new offerings which we’ll introduce a bit later today.

Here are some of the highlights in the new release:

• Mobile for the Enterprise
• One Platform for All
• Social Productivity
• Enterprise Integration
• App Mash-up
• Improved Performance
• Non-persisting entities
• Overall enhancements, tweaks and improvements

Click here to view the official release notes.

Spring is in the air (if you live in the northern hemisphere anyway)

This morning I tried to acquire a Mendix license for a project we are working on, when curiously enough the website had this message displayed. I wonder whats in store?

I know I’ll be refreshing my page the whole day, or I’ll just use that monitoring tool I wrote in Mendix to email me when they go live, or see if Mendix emails an announcement before that.

It’s the end of the world

We have all seen it before,the Chrysler building decimated by some apocalyptic disaster of some kind in various world ending scenarios at the movies, but this year it’s going to be different. Yes, 2012 is the end of the world. Not only a leap year too but a year filled with tons of fresh blog posts, already in the pipe line.

You might ask yourself why write a blog post if the world is going to end? The answer is, “Well, we just like modeling so darn much we don’t care if it all ends tomorrow”

Happy modeling for 2012!