Integration Overview
How Can I Integrate with Mendix?
Integration has always been an important part of application development, but the core challenge still remains: Integrating external systems into your applications is technically complex. Moreover, the move to in cloud-native and as-a-service software options has increased the difficulty and complexity of connecting disparate applications together to exchange data, trigger events, and orchestrate workflow processes.
At Mendix, we want to make sure that developers of all skill levels can leverage their skills using tools that make it as simple as possible to do what they need to with external systems. To that end, we have made investments in the platform to make it easy to connect applications and services with each other in a variety of ways, including SOAP, SQL, REST, OData, and more. And while REST has become a standard for building APIs and web services for applications to talk, we recognize that other web service protocols, standardized frameworks, and APIs remain valid options depending on the problem you are trying to solve.
Next to support for all main integration protocols, Mendix also provides additional tools to simplify integrating applications. Having tools to connect to APIs or databases is often only part of the work: you need to discover what is available in your organisation, you may want to curate which APIs your developers use and which should not be used, you may want to understand the dependencies between your applications to understand impact of changes.
What is Mendix Connect?
Mendix Connect includes all tools, connectors and modelling capabilities in Mendix that help you connect Mendix applications to other Mendix applications, and to other software used in your organisation.
- Studio Pro provides you with tools to define services and to use those services in your applications. This included REST Apis, SQL Databases, Data Warehouses and Datalakes, custom connectors and tools to map integration payloads. Studio Pro also provides virtualization of data and logic to simplify connecting to OData REST APIs.
- Catalog contains a registration of all the apps, environments, and services that you have running in your landscape, to help you quickly discover the APIs you need in the application you are modeling. Catalog enables you to register OpenAPI, OData $Metadata, AsyncAPI and WSDL contracts, so you have a complete overview of all services available. The Catalog is integrated into Studio Pro simplify API discovery and use.
- The Mendix cloud deployment process automatically registers the APIs published and consumed by your applications with the Catalog.
- The Mendix runtime to run your APIs and to call other APIs.
What Tools Can I Use for Integrating with Mendix?
Mendix offers you an extensive array of tools to handle integrations:
- Message definitions – specify what messages you exchange with external systems; these can be based on XML schemas, JSON snippets, or entities defined in your domain models
- Mappings – use visual specifications of how to translate external messages to and from entities in your Mendix applications
- Web services – publish microflows as web service operations and call external web services from your microflows
- REST services – publish microflows and entities as REST resources and operations and call external REST APIs from your microflows
- HTTP services – you can both publish and consume services using the HTTP protocol, regardless if they confirm to REST standards or not. You have full control over payloads, headers, and operations.
- OData – publish data in your application in a standardized REST format for easy use in business analytics tooling
- GraphQL – You can expose Mendix app data and queries as GraphQL endpoints for use in Mobile Apps, or Analytics tools.
- Connectors – implement purpose-built connector modules that provide easy-to-use microflow activities integrated with third-party services; examples include SAP, Kafka, Redis, and third-party services like Slack, Twitter, and Salesforce
- Connector Kit – the Mendix Connector Kit enables adding any custom integration using Java to Mendix in an easy, generic, and reusable way
- Database integration – the Mendix Database Connector allows you to configure direct JDBC connections to your database of choice for executing SQL queries and stored procedures
- Catalog – Connect external resources to an organization-specific catalog and use them in both BI tools (OData) & Mendix apps (via external entities)