Blogs

Another day, another tester leaking something they shouldn’t. You have no chance navigating your way to the flag though: It is simply not visible for you! Difficulty: Medium Let’s solve the No Accessible Vector challenge using the principles we’ve just learned. Make sure you read the Capture the Flag tips first, as this article leans heavily on the first. First, we read the description and realize that a tester built a page that we don’t have access to. We can use our first principle of using developer mistakes to theorize about the solution. One common mistake is a developer not realizing that all pages are accessible regardless of access rules. All we have to do is figure out the name of the page. ...

After winning this year’s Mendix Capture the Flag event, many people have asked me for tips. I wrote this writeup with my insights for next Capture the Flag events. Read on to learn more! Recap The Capture the Flag event consisted of three difficulty levels: Pizza Mario (beginner–medium), Patient Portal (hard–insane) and Magic level challenges. In total, you had about 30 hours to complete the 26 challenges. Since we solved 24 challenges (and also ate and slept), this leaves about 20 hours of hacking, which means solving approximately one challenge every hour of hacking. Time is of the essence, and working efficiently is important. ...

When you’re developing with Mendix, every second spent waiting for your app to boot quickly adds up. But which hardware actually delivers the best performance? And how much does it matter? To answer these questions, I created a custom Mendix benchmark test and asked developers across the community to run it on their own machines. With a wide range of hardware tested, we can now draw real, data-driven conclusions. Continue reading on to find out how to pick the best hardware for Mendix development. Want to read the full research and methodology? Check out the deep dive here. ...

This is an addition to the Mendix hardware survey article. For full transparency, I put the research results of the benchmark analysis in this blogpost. So anyone can double check my findings. As I don’t expect many people to read this, I’m not formatting this perfectly as I would a more public blogpost. Feel free to add your thoughts! A note on limitations The most powerful hardware often combines different aspects to achieve its results, so it is difficult to make conclusions on single components. If a PC performs well but has both a powerful CPU and GPU, it is hard to conclude which component contributes to its success. ...

The Dojo era For over a decade, Mendix used Dojo as a front-end client framework. Frameworks like Dojo save developers a lot of time by providing useful libraries out of the box. Dojo was among the most popular JavaScript frameworks for many years. However, the JavaScript landscape evolves rapidly, and other libraries have surpassed Dojo by being faster, more comprehensive, and easier to use. One of these libraries is React, which quickly became one of the most popular JavaScript frameworks. ...

Have you ever wondered how much of a difference in performance a better laptop makes? Have you ever wondered what aspects of a laptop you should focus on when looking for the best development machine for building Mendix applications? Introducing the Mendix Hardware Survey! During this survey, I want to research what contributes to a powerful Mendix development machine. The goal is to find out where to spend your money when looking for a new laptop. ...

For the last decade, Mendix has relied on SVN for version control. However, with Git surpassing SVN in functionality, migrating to Git became inevitable. With all the talk about using Git with Mendix, you probably considered migrating or have done so already. Having relied on SVN for so long, many developers became accustomed to working with SVN. Now that updating is suddenly called pulling, and committing doesn’t mean what it used to mean anymore, many developers are confused about the differences between SVN and Git. ...

Creating lists in Mendix is one of its core features. You can use lists for looping over objects. Lists can improve performance by batch-committing objects. Aggregation functions can perform calculations and summations on your list, making them an integral part of any Mendix applications. However, as lists grow larger, they start to become SLOW. You might wonder why. Mendix is based on Java. This means that most of what you create in Mendix is translated into Java code. When you create a Mendix list, you’re essentially creating an ArrayList. ArrayLists are convenient because they’re flexible. They allow you to add objects to it on the fly without requiring you to pre-allocate memory. ArrayLists support a wide range of operations, including insertion, removal, and retrieval of elements, making them versatile data structures for managing collections of objects. Of course, Mendix handles all of this in the background. ...

If your app runs in the Mendix cloud you are probably using the Mendix Developer Portal to deploy your application. Deploying this way takes several steps: creating a deployment package, transferring it to the desired environment, and restarting the app. Each step can take several minutes after which you have to check back to see if you can progress further. You’ll save a lot of time and frustration by automating this process. In this blog post, I’ll go over my automated deployment pipeline using Postman. The Postman collection contains several services for the Mendix API. It has services to build, transport, and deploy new packages. After setting it up, you’ll be able to use the Postman Collection Runner to run these requests in sequence and deploy with a single press of a button! ...

No matter what you do for a living, making sure you have the right tools for the job is essential for any working professional. Mendix Studio Pro is a great piece of software to build apps with, but there are a plethora of other tools that can help you build apps more efficiently than ever before. In this article, I go over my recommendations for must-have tools for everyday use in Mendix development. ...