The Business Agility Blog

We are proud! Mendix has just been listed “Cool Vendor” by industry research firm Gartner in the category “Cool Vendors in Application Development, New Tools, 2009″ published on March 30th. We see this as Gartner´s recognition of our vision, innovations and success as a team!

Gartner defines a “Cool Vendor” as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are:

1. Innovative: enable users to do things they couldn’t do before;
2. Impactful: have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology);
3. Intriguing: have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity within approximately the past six months.

The report notes that, “As development projects and processes deal with complex business problems and large quantities of information, the translation of the business need into a tangible design addresses a major source of project failure and are at the root of many development project horror stories.”

According to Gartner, “Development managers and business analysts should develop new methods for successfully deploying applications built with newer, more-complex tools and processes”.

In the report, Gartner selected vendors that have “cool” approaches to application development, and, specifically, the management, specification and quality delivery of complex development projects.

Note: We can’t publish the entire report here, but go the Gartner website to find it (search for ‘mendix’). Analysis was done by research director David Norton.

Disclaimer about Gartner’s Cool Vendor Selection Process

Gartner’s listing does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness of a particular purpose. Gartner defines a cool vendor as a company that offers technologies or solutions that are: Innovative, enable users to do things they couldn’t do before; Impactful, have, or will have, business impact (not just technology for the sake of technology); Intriguing, have caught Gartner’s interest or curiosity in approximately the past six months.

I’ve attended the session on Domain-Specific Modeling @ MoDELS ‘08. It’s nice to see the latest scientific efforts on this subject. It’s even nicer to see the similarities between these efforts and the features of the Mendix technology.

In short the sessions did emphasize the importance of language integration (e.g. multiple connected DSLs describing a full application) and the management of this integration, so-called multi-model management.

At Mendix we have already been working for more than three years on this topic, which has resulted in a modelling environment supporting multiple DSLs describing different system aspects. Key elements of our multi-model approach are:

• Specific DSLs: little languages, targeted at one system aspect (i.e. data, GUI, processes, business rules, security, etc.) and where possible exposed in such a way that the DSL can be understood by business engineers/analysts.
• DSL interfaces: each DSL can publish (part of) its concepts and can use concepts from other DSLs. For example in the Form DSL (describing the GUI) elements can be linked to elements from the Business Object DSL. Another example is the Microflow DSL which is linked to data elements, business rules and forms.
• Change propagation: changes in one DSL have to be propagated to the DSLs using concepts from the DSL ‘under-change’.
• Consistency checking: because all DSLs are fully integrated in one modelling environment, we can identify inconsistencies and we can either fix them automatically or notify the user.

For more information on our DSLs and the supporting tooling see our technology overview. For some background theory of MDE and DSL check out DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven Approaches.