Mendix 10 is coming, what are the most important improvements?

On June 27th, Mendix 10 will be officially introduced. There will be a number of significant improvements, including improved usability, new capabilities for AI and machine learning, and a big speed boost for the platform. What will people notice when upgrading to Mendix 10? Our colleague Bart Poelmans tried out the beta version and shares his findings.

According to Bart, the latest Mendix release does not bring any huge changes to the table, which is a positive thing: “At Bizzomate we have been a Mendix partner for years and have experienced many releases. Mendix has been moving away from big new releases with lots of new features for a while now. While that may not sound very exciting, it is actually good for developers and organizations using Mendix. It makes it easier to upgrade to the next version because new versions build further on the foundation of previous versions. With many big changes at the same time, you run the risk of suddenly having a lot of extra work to manage. Now the impact of a new version is much smaller because it requires less work,  and is more predictable.”

Biggest upgrades: look & feel and speed
While there are no radical changes, Bart sees plenty of improvements in Mendix 10: “Mendix’s interface has had a major upgrade, which makes it more modern in terms of look and feel. That change already started with Mendix 9 but has now been implemented across the board.”

Performance has also improved: “Mendix has listened carefully to the community. Mendix Studio Pro itself has become faster, making it a lot better to work with. These improvements have started with Mendix 9 and are continued in Mendix 10. The latest release also contains performance improvements for the actual development process. Sometimes when developing an application, you would find out that a nanoflow should be a microflow, or vice versa. Those flows describe the logic of your application, a nanoflow runs on a client, such as a browser or mobile app, while a microflow runs on the server. Before, if you wanted to switch between the two, it meant rebuilding a piece of the application. Now you can easily convert it without making any major changes to your application.”

“The code repository, which stores all the code and assets for application development, is also getting an upgrade. In older versions, Subversion was used, but with Mendix 10, we’re switching to Git. For low-code development, this means a big step forward; Git is more modern, faster and there are many more integrations and tools available that work with Git. The switch will be mandatory, but Mendix makes the migration possible at the push of a button.”

Integrations, AI and machine learning
“AI and machine learning are much discussed topics lately, but those capabilities have been in Mendix for a while. Integrations with native machine learning models are possible, a big advantage because it is possible to use models that do not exist yet in future Mendix applications when they become available. In addition, the functionality of AI-driven bots, which help you apply Mendix best practices, has also been extended again.”

No more support for Mendix 7
The arrival of Mendix 10 means the end of support for Mendix 7. In practice, this will not cause any major problems according to Bart: “If you still have applications that are based on Mendix 7, they will just keep running. Users and developers won’t notice immediate changes. At the same time, I do recommend upgrading to the latest Mendix version. With the latest version you can use the latest functionalities, a significantly improved way of working and an application with more possibilities. In addition, Mendix will also no longer release security patches for Mendix 7, so migrating to a higher Mendix version is important for security as well.”

“Many of the new features are a logical evolution of things that have been added to the platform before. While that doesn’t make Mendix 10 a ‘big-bang’ release, those additions and improvements make it possible to develop even better solutions, and that’s ultimately the biggest win.”