A few weeks ago, we had a blog post that showed just how versatile the Mendix platform really is: almost any browser, any hardware, and even the Wii will run these applications flawlessly. The coming debut of the iPad in March will provide us with yet another fun piece of hardware to try. As usual, the world raises an eyebrow every time Apple comes out with a new product. Naturally, we’ll make sure Mendix applications run as easily on Apple’s new iPad as they do on the iPhone. We agree with much of the tech world in saying that the iPad will gain in popularity once developers take advantage of its new features.

Can’t wait to see what our business engineers come up with.

Companies using Mendix on their iPad may find that it lends itself to business processes more easily than its phone-enabled cousin. The screen is big enough for multiple people to use it – easily!

Just think of the possibilities: sales people presenting to clients on the road, inventory management in retail stores, order pickers in warehouses. Load a Mendix application and you’ve reached a whole new level of finger swiping efficiency. Whether you’re tracking inventory, customers, products, or pitches – this device will make your job easier.

There are a lot of uses for the iPad out there that do not exist for the iPhone or iPod Touch. As developers unleash the iPad’s true genius, we can look forward to applications that change the way people do business.

Since Mendix is all about increasing business agility, we see some serious potential in using the Mendix platform on the iPad. In effect, the iPad can increase business agility as well. With more information at your fingertips people can make decisions faster. The tablet vs. netbook argument still exists, and I’m not necessarily here to answer it.

Mendix customers that use the iPad, iTouch, iPhone, Mac, or host of other devices, have grown to expect top notch applications – especially when their business people think strategically.

A “What If” question for business analysts and IT professionals…

What if it suddenly became very easy for someone to do both your job and their own, at the same time? If history provides any forecast for the future of IT, we are likely to see some interesting changes in the way human capital is managed – especially for those of us involved in the emergence of cloud computing. Clouds push complexity to the background and allow users to focus on what really matters: functionality and costs.

Have you ever noticed how the education we receive often sets boundaries in our career aspirations? We are trained to do something, and do it well – but in doing so, we take for granted the fact that others are doing the same thing in a different field. Then, when we are faced with an inevitable change, we instinctively take a “That’s not what I’ve been trained to do, there are other people for that” mentality. Sure, there are the motivated few who push down boundaries and become renaissance men and women in their own right. But when everyone else is set in their ways, these people are often considered a risk… think: too many eggs in one basket.

Now, to regress from my pseudo-philosophical banter, this trend is becoming all the more apparent as business analysts become more involved in technical training. Most IT veterans would say that business analysts will never have the true know-how to implement their plans, requirements and recommendations. The modern business analyst usually considers themselves more of a problem solver than a programmer – hence the separation of labor in this function of any business. Having surveyed the blogosphere for opinions of business analysts and IT professionals, there seems to be a live (and even a bit emotional) discussion between those who say it is a natural, and therefore inevitable, progression and those who say it is a “pie in the sky” and that it will never happen.

Contrastingly, a growing population of believers has something to say about the segregation of business and IT. In a world of zeros and ones, the innumerable coding languages can only become more and more efficient. As coding languages are continuously created, survival of the fittest can account for the extinct languages of modern programming. An abstraction of these languages is an ongoing phenomenon with a light at the end of the tunnel. Some say that using abstract, visual and human-readable models instead of low-level code is a very important step towards commoditized coding.

I’ve come to think about this abstraction phenomenon as measure to increase efficiency. When our ancestors realized that making bricks was faster than packing sand, they were on to something similar. If someone else uses molds to make perfectly shaped bricks that can be built into any structure, the workers need different skills but can ultimately build more economically, the architect can plan more accurately, and the buyer can move in earlier. So, why deal with sand when we can get the bricks from vendors elsewhere. Why deal with code, when we can get software modules elsewhere? This, my friends, may be the future of today’s business analyst.  In the future, what if business analysts had the skill set and the molds to create bricks that satisfy their requirements without the need to deal with code – or sand?

What we love most, is when a customer goes home after a long day in the office, and then continues building Mendix apps for personal use. Why? Just because they can.

Last night Jeff Erno, one of our latest community members, published a nice post about his (after-hours) Mendix modeling experience:

“As a part of my job I have been learning a new software tool for building web applications called Mendix. It is pretty fascinating since it is codeless. The building of the data model and forms for user interface are done interactively and the algorithms are just visual flowchart models. The usual learning tutorial was to create a pizza delivery web application, but I had what I thought was a better idea that I could make use of and be a bit more passionate about, a workout tracker.”

Read more about Jeff’s MX-perience and see screenshots on his blog here

The Mendix client team puts a lot of time and effort into writing code that works across a wide range of browsers. Besides the obvious A-browsers on the support list we like to push the envelope by trying to run complex applications on new or interesting environments. Here are a few pictures of some recent experiments. Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean any of these environments are officially supported!

Here we have a Web Client running on the OLPC XO-1, probably one of the lowest low-end machines you’re likely to find in the wild these days. Loading the app took some time and the interface response was a bit sluggish, but it loaded cleanly and without modifications.

Mendix Web Client on OLPC

Next up, Nintendo’s latest console is the Wii. It has WiFi and an Internet Channel (which is basically a highly customized Opera9 build). Can we wave the WiiMote around and control a Web Client instance? Yes we can! The app loads without a hitch and we’re waving our way through sets of data, though it’s obvious that an old CRT television screen is not exactly the best display option for these apps.

Mendix Web Client on Nintendo Wii / Opera

Last up in today’s browser hijinks, Google ChromeOS. Or Google Chrome running on Google ChromeOS, whatever works for you. Chrome is browser that just makes me happy. The new V8 JavaScript engine and isolated processes-per-tab set a new standard for performance and reliability. Google has decided that what the world needs is an OS without local storage and that just runs everything straight from the cloud. The source has recently been open-sourced and we picked up a disk image. A few clicks later, we’re logged into the Google cloud and load in our by now familiar CRM app.

Mendix Web Client on ChromeOS/Chrome

We’re still a long way from having an ecosystem where all browsers follow the same standard and implement them all the same way. But if nothing else this experiment is an indicator that modern browsers are mature enough to use as  runtimes for complex applications. Or that we’ve just bullet-proofed our Web Client enough to run on the crazy variety of browsers out there. Take your pick.

Last Friday, the 25^th of September, Mendix organized a Mendix Essentials event in Rotterdam with almost 30 participants from various companies and backgrounds. The Mendix Essentials are monthly recurring events where Mendix presents interested parties with the technology and vision of the company.

The program was packed with interesting demos, presentation and an exciting guest presentation from Atos Origin by Maarten Baas .

Visitors were very enthusiastic after attending the program and just like we hoped, this Mendix Essentials triggered a significant amount of discussion and a great deal of positive reactions from the audience.

For those who missed it, consider registering for our monthly Mendix Essentials events on 30 October or 27 November .

Here are some impressions

Beginning of the Atos origin presentation

Maarten Baas from Atos Origin presenting

Mendix CTO, Roald Kruit explains the Mendix proposition

HST groep, a transport and logistics service provider based in the Netherlands developed an award winning portal together with Mendix partner CAPE Groep. The portal informs HST’s customers about the CO2 – emission resulting from their transport orders; thereby the portal gives additional information about the ways of fulfillment of their transport orders.

Although customers of HST already used an internet portal to offer transport orders to HST, the new portal and functionality offers opportunity to choose the most sustainable transportation options, directly influencing the bottom line. The portal runs on the Mendix platform and was implemented by CAPE Groep.

With this portal HST has made a great leap forward in combining sustainable transportation and cost control. Therefore the portal was awarded with “the lean and green award”. The lean and green award is an initiative from the ministry of transport and industry organizations. The award is granted to companies that display exceptional measures that not only influence cost reductions but also enable more sustainable operations.

During the “Connekt Congress” HST Groep’s Gerard ter Brugge was presented with the award by senator, Dr. Eric Janse de Jonge.

The portal was also covered in this month’s TTM magazine.

Mendix congratulates HST and CAPE Groep with this prestigious award.

Yesterday Mendix joined the ‘BPM congres 2009’. Governmental organisations, Universities and companies shared their knowledge about BPM by giving presentations, master classes and workshops.

The day had an informative character and visitors shared knowledge about BPM and the role of BPM in the organisations of the future.

Mendix Head of R&D Johan den Haan, presented Mendix’ vision and the Mendix approach towards the development of service oriented business applications.

The visitors were very positive about this new way of software engineering.

Impression from the information market @ BPM 2009

Head R&D of Mendix, Johan den Haan explains

Mendix Partner Manager Jan-Mark Maas

Mendix’ UK partner RDF Group, will be guest speaker at the Business Analysis Conference in London. The Principal Consultant Franco Civello will be talking about Model Driven Development (MDD) and the way it significantly reduces software costs and how all design decisions can be made and enforced at the Business Analysis level.

Mendix will be presented as a realistic new tool for the majority of the application development projects.
A great event for all UK companies looking for new innovative ways of software delivery. Enroll for this event now.

This month’s edition of Quote Magazine published an interview with Mendix CEO Derek Roos. In the interview Roos explains about his experiences during the financial crisis.

Quote Magazine

Last week, Insurance Networking News, published an article about “Cloud Computing”. Although many think that Cloud Computing is something for the future, some leading companies within industries you wouldn’t expect are deploying Cloud Computing initiatives using Mendix software.

Your Next ‘Cloud’ Provider May Not be a Tech Company at All

By Joe McKendrick

If you don’t use Amazon Web Services, Salesforce.com modules or rent server capacity from IBM’s facilities, you’re obviously not doing “cloud” computing, right?

Not so fast. Actually, you may already be doing some form of cloud computing, but it’s just not being called that. Cloud computing is defined as the acquisition of services from online providers. As the promise of the cloud unfolds, it’s likely that a typical cloud provider will not be a technology company, but an industry partner that is capable of sharing applications and data.

Take the example of Arch Re Facultative, a supplier of facultative reinsurance in the United States and Canada and a subsidiary of New York-based Arch Capital Group. The company is by no means a “cloud provider”—it reinsures risk for insurance industry clients.

But through its intelligent portal technology, Arch Re has been able to position itself as an online resource for its customers, who have widely varying levels of technology expertise. I recently had the chance to chat with Philip Augur, chief operations officer at Arch Re’s latest portal implementation, which automates much of the “automatics,” and also helps expedite the exceptions as well.

Arch Re’s story appears in the latest edition of Insurance Networking News online.

“We sign an automatic with a company that is interested in submitting the risks in this fashion,” Augur told me. “The underwriters are given a login and password. And as they come across risks in their day-to-day business that fits the box, they come on to our Web site and they submit that risk. The portal verifies that it fits the definitions of the box and applies the pre-agreed pricing. If it doesn’t fit the parameters of the box, it tells the underwriter that, but then it says, ‘we’ll still handle that pure facultative, but they don’t have to re-enter anything—the information just comes through to our staff as a special exception to the automatic agreement.”

The portal has eased a major administrative burden for many underwriters who previously had to track down data from their own internal systems. Now, “some prefer to keep the all the information in our system, so we know what fits the ‘box,’ and it’s easy for us to define that,” Augur said. “So once a month, we’ll press a button, extract that information, and send them the information.”

Could Arch Re be considered a “private cloud” provider to its customers? No, again, it’s a facultative reinsurer, and that’s its business. But the definition fits and, ultimately, many non-technology companies will find themselves in the role of providing services via their own private clouds.

Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant, blogger and frequent INN contributor specializing in information technology. He can be reached at joe@mckendrickresearch.com.

The opinions of bloggers on www.insurancenetworking.com do not necessarily reflect those of Insurance Networking News.

Click here for the article

This month’s edition of Business Process Magazine published an extensive interview with Mendix Mendix CEO Derek Roos. In the article Roos gives insight in Mendix’ vision on model-driven application development and process-centric business automation. He also sheds light on Mendix strategy and product roadmap.

*Please note article is in Dutch only

Over the last few weeks, a class of bachelor students from Technical University Twente completed the course “Business Information Systems” for which they had to work in 5 small, agile teams to build a working business application using Mendix.  Each team could pick from a list of real-life cases and model a fullfledged application “from scratch” in only a few weeks. After completion the teacher graded all projects and awarded the best application with an A (or in Dutch equivalent: 10 out of 10)!

And the winning team is:

… Dennis Pallet and Allard Brand with their Mendix implementation of the “University Enrollment Case”.

Congratulations guys!! Well done! Below is an summary of the jury report:

The University enrollment case is the most complete project for several reasons. First of all, the project was correctly modeled; the project contains several validations, delete behaviour was set and they clearly used the Mendix Modeling conventions. The group was able to make use of webservices to streamline the enrollment process. Further, by calling a Java action, they made it possible to generate passwords given that it requires anonymous access. This realistic approach is supported by both admin interfaces and student interfaces. The group also worked out the idea of sending a welcome email to University’s new applicants. Most important, this University enrollment case reduces lots of manual work, processes are more efficient and the simple sign-up process is user friendly.

Proud-looking Dennis Pallet and Allard Brand

For years now we have been claiming to “build better solutions quicker”. Nonetheless, it always sounds better if others say it!

UK-based IT services firm RDF Group performed an independent bench mark analysis, measuring performance of the Mendix Platform against the use of traditional techniques. As the stats below show, results were amazing: 670 days (traditional) versus 171 days in Mendix!

Benchmark analysis MDD vs Custom Devleopment

Interestingly, results also show a strong difference in the activity breakdown. While in the traditional scenario most effort was dedicated to manually “programming” the application, in Mendix the majority of time was spent on “analysis/modelling”.

About the BIN solution
BIN stands for Bank Identification Number and is the unique identifier of a bank on a payment card. Due to the high costs involved in becoming an FSA approved card distributor many organizations choose to gain access to the card market through a primary vendor, effectively a sponsorship relationship between the master approved vendor (The BIN Sponsor) and the company wishing to offer the card to their customers.

A BIN sponsor needs an invoicing application to manage revenue streams from the cards issued through BIN sponsorship. Invoice charges can be calculated in a variety of ways based on volume of transaction, total amount of transactions or as a predetermined fee. In addition data to calculate these charges is based on card activity through ATM usage, merchant’s POS or online e-commerce orders – therefore any automated invoicing application has to integrate with card processor data.

Background casestudy
The solution to BIN sponsorship invoicing was a data-rich application with some fairly complex business logic. RDF felt this assignment was a perfect test project to trial the Mendix capabilities. After these results, RDF decided to adopt Mendix in its service and solution portfolio and become exclusive distributor for Mendix products in the UK. The developed BIN Sponsorship Invoicing Tool is a commercial, high quality application available for demonstration or purchase.

Download casestudy here

Bashing the JavaScript language is becoming an increasingly popular activity. It’s also an easy target because it’s a language most people over the age of 20 associate with pointless CPU hogging activity.

OK, so JavaScript used to have a bad rep. You’d think that four years or so after Google came out with GMail and Google Maps, we’d be past this. Well, apparently we’re not.

To quote Jonathan Edwards (JavaScript is good enough),

The web development community consciously chose to stick with a pathetically crippled technology to avoid having to change.

Ouch.

That sounds pretty damning, doesn’t it? Luckily, we’re on the Internet, where quotes never get taken out of context and are never used as the basis for an opinion.

In that spirit, here’s another quote, this time from Bjarne Soustrup.

“There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”.

JavaScript has been with us since the mid-90s. No real programmers complained about it because, well, it was considered a toy language. Why waste time complaining about a language that nobody would take seriously when there were Really Important languages to complain about?

With browsers only allowing JavaScript in browsers to interact with the user and not the server it remained a toy. Something associated with unwanted pop-ups and interference with the user’s browsing behaviour.

Somewhere along the line a programmer at Microsoft was tasked with giving Outlook a web interface and immediately ran into the “JavaScript can’t do server interaction” restriction. This programmer built an extension to IE and (with other programmers) allowed IE to use JavaScript to communicate with the server without changing pages.

And *boom* AJAX was born.

Well, it wasn’t yet, but this is where it started. Around this time Microsoft had killed Netscape, considered itself dominant in the browser space and simply stopped developing Internet Explorer. The state IE was then is still the baseline for all web application development today. Keep that in mind, because it’s important. And bear with me, because I’m going to dive into history for a bit.

Internet Explorer 6 became the dominant browser world-wide. Netscape was dead, its source code open-sourced, but its community hell-bent on a re-write of the whole software. Joel Spolski wrote a (now famous) article on this in 2000 Things you should never do.

It would take years before a new browser emerged from this. In the mean time, other browsers were also being developed. And although compliance with standards was important, all the teams saw the importance of being compatible with IE6. Being compatible with the Microsoft DOM implementation was a lot more work than being compatible with the Microsoft JavaScript implementation (the Netscape SpiderMonkey engine having been reverse-engineered to JScript).

New browsers started to emerge and luckily, Microsoft did not take notice of this. The new browsers could render pages just like Internet Explorer, take plugins like Flash and generally take the place of IE. But what these browsers also did was implement the special functionality that IE used to communicate with the server while staying on the same page.

This was noticed in technical circles but only as an observation. Some software firms experimented with this new cross-browser functionality but it had almost zero impact until Google launched GMail. Once Google lauched GMail, everybody started paying attention. The entire ‘Web 2.0′ buzz started with the launch of GMail.

The ‘Web 2.0′ buzz has rightfully been seen as a new dom-com bubble. But that’s not what Google started. Google showed the world that there are new ways of leveraging existing web technology. After GMail, they upped the ante by bringing out Google Maps.

Since then the development of web-based software has jumped and outside of streaming media, all the developments have been in JavaScript. Even streaming media only uses other languages and runtimes (mostly Flash) only for streaming media. Every other aspect is implemented in JavaScript.

And why not? JavaScript is a simple but powerful language. Even in its mid-90s incarnation it’s more powerful than many ‘modern’ languages. Read up on Douglas Crockford’s classic paper on JavaScript The World’s Most Misunderstood Programming Language if you missed the memo.

JavaScript has its warts and I’ll be the first to admit that. However, the warts are small and it’s easy to work around them. Every language has its ups and downs. Programming C I wish for dynamic structures, programming Ruby I wish for type checking, programming JavaScript (ECMA-262) I wish for co-routines (and ‘watch’ in IE).

JavaScript is the language of the web and as people get used to it, it is starting to grow beyond the browser. There are web frameworks that use server-side JavaScript, One prominent Google employee recently ported the Ruby on Rails framework to server-side JavaScript.

JavaScript’s popularity is also starting to push its way into other frameworks by making the JS environment accessible to developers not working against DOM implementations.

A few years ago the JavaScript engines were limited to SpiderMonkey, its unofficial twin brother JScript, and a port to Java in the form of Rhino. Now we have those, but also Google’s V8, Adobe’s Tamarin, the TraceMonkey engine and Apple’s SquirrelfishCore.

JavaScript is growing and is growing fast. It might not be an ideal language, but which language is? It is a powerful language and one that has depth that is not immediately obvious to casual observers. It is also the language of the web, so either learn it or provide an alternative if you’re going to moan about it.