Why we’re different
Mendix combines advantages that are traditionally associated with diverse technology areas (e.g. development tools, portals, BPM and SOA). Our ambition is to provide a superior and 100% integrated solution for companies seeking to lower the risk of traditional custom development and overcome rigidity of standard enterprise applications.
To prove our claim, UK-based RDF Group performed a benchmark study, for which they compared the development efforts of a highly custom business applications using Java and Mendix.
The results are convincing. Eventual metrics show that building the application in Mendix required substantially less days than custom developing in Java. The Java case took up 670 development days, compared to 171 days in Mendix, which even included the initial training and education of the RDF development team in using Mendix. An even more interesting observation is that the Mendix team spent the majority of their time on “analysis & modeling”, whereas the “Java” team spent most on manual coding.
For a more detailed observation on Mendix in comparison to other technology platforms, check out:
Mendix versus Custom Development (Java/.NET)
Mendix is often used as an alternative or accelerator for custom development in Java or Microsoft .NET, often in offshore development centers. Mendix offers all the flexibility of standard programming languages without its disadvantages:
- Increase development speed en flexibility by eliminating unnecessary steps in the development cycle
- Give business users a more central role in the development process with more and shorter feedback loops
- Important architecture principles are automatically applied to enable scalability, security and high performance
- Mendix prevents you from having to invent the wheel time and again by offering out-of-the-box functionality
- ‘Documentation’ is always and automatically up-to-date
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Mendix versus 4GL tools
Whereas 4GL tools were aimed to shorten the software development process, many of today´s 4GL implementations suffer from a lack of flexibility, innovation and a lock-in by proprietary or badly supported technology, often resulting in companies resorting to 3GL custom development. Mendix strives to overcome these issues by offering an open, standards-based platform that offers the best of both worlds. Many of our customers have already chosen to replace or migrate their 4GL apps to Mendix. Key reasons are:
- Combines both the advantages of Model-Driven development (speed & flexibility) with 3rd generation programming languages (freedom)
- Extend your functionality to the web with web 2.0 technologies
- Supports open standards to avoid vendor lock-in
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Mendix versus middleware platforms
Since most of today’s SOA platforms have emerged from either the ERP or middleware space (often resulting from series of acquisitions), these products traditionally lack strong development capabilities when it comes to building high-end portal or business applications. Mendix usually extends these platforms with superior application development capabilities.
- Rapidly build new business applications without depending on the availability of Web services or a middleware layer
- Also migrate your “satellite” apps (Access, Excel, custom) to a standards-based “service-oriented” environment that’s compliant with your architecture
- Create superior service-oriented business applications (SOBA) with the same principles as the rest of your SOA (Business centric, flexible, losely coupled)
- Use a Model-driven approach towards application development, enabling business and IT professionals to optimally work together
- Use Mendix as a more cost-effective tool environment
- Easily create new web services that can be exposed to composite applications or an Enterprise Service Bus
- Use already existing web services easily in new build applications