How Mendix Takes Cloud Foundry from an Apps Platform to ‘Business Engineering’ – InApps Technology 2022

As the idea of deploying and managing applications at scale matures, it comes time for organizations to reconsider their business rationales. Staging their business operations on platforms means, at some level, moving their business models to those platforms as well — which could be more like a heart and lung transplant, rather than just the latter.

During the last Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, Mendix Chief Technology Officer Johan den Haan discussed how his company’s mobile apps development platform — built around a Cloud Foundry nucleus — is being engineered with this emerging fact in mind. He also spoke of how, at the same time, it’s important that professional programmers be replaced with business managers in the development process.

“Certain types of applications, enterprise applications, can be built using our platform’s visual models,” said den Haan, for an interview for InApps Technology Makers podcast. “But in some cases, you need to extend that. So we also support extending your models using Java or JavaScript on the front end. That means if you have that certain integration you need to build yourself, or that specific algorithm, you can still extend that using a traditional programming language.

“So I see it as a spectrum, where you have applications that can be built by citizen developers,” den Haan continued, “[and] that can be built by more tech-savvy business engineers, domain experts.” This comment prompted Chip Childers, co-founder and vice president of technology for the Cloud Foundry Foundation, who also joined us for this interview, to underscore the relevance of business engineering with the Mendix platform.

Hear more from Childers and den Haan as they reassemble the landscape of digital business, in this latest edition of InApps Technology Makers here:

How Mendix Takes Cloud Foundry From An Apps Platform To ‘Business Engineering’

Also available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Overcast, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn

In This Edition:

1:25: How Mendix is utilizing Cloud Foundry.
3:32: Mendix working with data analysts through visual models, data models, and user interface models.
8:26: Exploring the low code phenomenon and developing visual objects.
13:29: How Cloud Foundry has worked with its constituents to embrace tooling built with Kubernetes
17:30: The overall software and PaaS market currently.
19:14: The tradeoffs organizations have to make with a low code approach and what they are doing to help mitigate those tradeoffs.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation is a sponsor of InApps Technology.