The Siemens subsidiary announced the new offerings at its annual Mendix World event last week, along with a range of products and services including new AI features for its low-code PaaS, an updated Data Hub designed to allow developers to more easily connect to a variety of off-the-shelf and custom data sources, and new Smart AppServices to digitalize and automate business workflows.

Low-code and no-code platforms are often used by companies to help developers rapidly develop applications and cut labour costs. According to Gartner, nearly 75% of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives by 2024. Gartner associate principal research analyst Akash Jain commented:

“It is a growing trend within many enterprises to empower business technologists and citizen developers with low-code tools that will allow these enterprises to rapidly develop required digital solutions.”

The COVID-19 crisis showed that companies that adopted a low-code approach to development adjusted more quickly and effectively to the crisis than businesses that relied solely on conventional development, proving that rapid app development and constant iteration of software have become table stakes for competitive enterprises, according to a recent Forrester Wave report.

Industry Clouds target key business sectors

To help facilitate rapid app development for key industries, the new Mendix Industry Clouds will feature reusable templates that focus on addressing challenges specific to the targeted business sectors. According to Mendix CTO Johan den Haan, Industry Clouds will help form an industry-focused, low-code community as it will incorporate APIs, Mendix AppServices, connectors to data sources, and offer ways for its community of 250,000 “makers” to share app development and industry knowledge.

Mendix for Manufacturing and Mendix for Financial Services are available now. The financial cloud offers templates for Credit Rating, Claims Management, and Portfolio Management, while the industry cloud includes templates for Smart Warehousing, Predictive Maintenance, and Smart Workforce Planning.

Mendix also announced an AppServices Framework, available now for ISVs and partners who want to sell their services on the Mendix marketplace. The framework includes provisioning, metering, and billing. A new Solutions Platform for ISVs includes IP protection on top of integrated metering and billing, as well as tools to extend and maintain low-code-developed applications.

Mendix offers new AI, Data Hub services

A new Mendix suite of Smart AppServices is designed for those building applications with digital business workflows and offers capabilities for document data capture and cognitive services such as language and sentiment analysis, including the ability to understand conversations that take place via messages. The suite can be used to enhance applications acquired through the Mendix Marketplace.

According to Gartner’s Jain, low-code capabilities are increasingly being utilized for automating business workflows owing to their AI capabilities such as optical character recognition, natural language processing (NLP), and sentiment analysis. The new Mendix capabilities should enhance the ability of the company’s platform to quickly offer value to developers, said Thomas Boogert, strategic planner and ICT product owner at Secrid, a Dutch wallet maker and Mendix customer.

“One of the biggest strengths of developing with Mendix lies in the startup phase of developing an app. Where a code solution would take weeks or months to set up the basics of an application and security, Mendix only takes a couple of days,” Boogert said. “The announcement of the AppServices Framework and Industry Solutions enable us to start building actual business value with Mendix even faster.”

Mendix enhances automation capabilities

Boogert said:

“Even though the expansion of Data Hub is not that relevant for us yet, as we only have two applications up and running, we already see that a lot of the budget is spent on integrating different apps. Expanding these capabilities is helping Mendix become the core of larger corporations IT landscapes.”

A new AI capability slated for availability later this year is Page Bot, part of Mendix’s AI-based service called Assist. In combination with the previously available Logic Bot and Performance Bot, it looks into instances of application development and ensures that apps follow architectural patterns. Page Bot will assist developers in UI and UX development, after learning from anonymized data sets.

The company also announced a separate machine learning kit for Mendix, available later this year, that will allow organizations to incorporate custom machine learning models into their applications.

At the time, Vandenberghe was a 25-year-old software developer, working as an intern on the mobile product team at global news agency Thomson Reuters. Today, the native of Bucharest, Romania, is the co-founder and chief experience officer of Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Chili Piper, a meeting scheduler for corporate clients and their sales teams. Founded in 2016, Chili Piper brings in roughly $10 million in annual recurring revenue from 30,000 different clients, including names like Spotify, Airbnb and Shopify.

The 143-employee start-up has pulled in $54 million in funding to date, from investors like Flashpoint Venture Capital and Gradient Ventures, Google’s AI investment arm. Vandenberghe says Chili Piper is on track to hit $20 million in annual revenue by the end of 2021.

Plenty of start-up founders credit Jobs with inspiring them to take the entrepreneurial leap. Vandenberghe is one of the precious few who can directly attribute her company’s ethos to a personal interaction with the late Apple co-founder: All those years ago, Jobs selected a Thomson Reuters app she helped build for the launch of Apple’s first iPad.

Any young software developer would have taken that vote of confidence and run with it. But for Vandenberghe, a young woman in tech who grew up under a Communist regime, working with Jobs meant something particularly special. It was the exact type of mentorship she needed to find her competitive edge.

In a post on the Newsroom website, Apple is showcasing a number of schools, educators, and students in Australia who have used Swift to learn how to code. Swift is Apple’s open-source programming language that is now incorporated by developers in tons of apps on the App Store.

One of the stories Apple highlighted was TAFE Queensland, the state’s largest training provider. According to the article, the company will soon offer iOS app development with Swift training to students starting in October. The course was co-created between TAFE Queensland, Apple engineers, and educators.

Apple says that there are now 160,00 app economy jobs in Australia and that new jobs continue to increase at a rate of ten percent every year.

“Since the launch of the App Store in 2008, the iOS app ecosystem has been an engine of growth and among the fastest-growing sectors of the world’s economy. There are now close to 160,000 app economy jobs across Australia, a figure that’s been increasing by 10 percent every year since 2017. Today, there are nearly 2 million apps on the App Store, which has facilitated over $600 billion (US) in commerce in 2020 alone, while the sale of digital goods and services through the App Store has earned developers over $200 billion (US) to date.”

The W3C describes the Web Audio API as a JavaScript API for creating, shaping, and manipulating sounds directly in a Web browser.

Web Audio API is already widely used by developers creating music and sound effects for Web pages, and the W3C says it is also used for the creation of online musical instruments, for Web games, and for collaborative artworks such as sound installations.

What makes the Web Audio API different is that it has been designed for use for sound creation rather than just the playback of recorded audio. W3C says it “provides a rich set of modular building blocks which web and app developers can combine to create a wide range of applications“. Suggested uses include auditory feedback in user interfaces, musical instruments, soundtracks and effects for entertainment and gaming, teaching, spatial audio for AR and VR, online audio editing apps, crossfading and compression for in-car music management, and audio analysis and visualization.

The acceptance as a standard by W3C is largely a formal move, as the API was already standardized and deployed as a royalty-free feature in Web browsers and other devices and platforms, both on desktop and mobile. In view of this the W3C says creating sound with the Web Audio API has become a dependable, widely deployed, built-in capability, eliminating the need to install plugins or download separate applications.

Looking to the future, the Web Audio Working Group has already started work on Web Audio API v2. They says this will build on and enrich the first version of the API, adding more complex and much-requested features which were insufficiently developed to be included in the first version of the API.

DeepMap’s technology will bolster the mapping and localization capabilities of NVIDIA DRIVE after the acquisition is expected to close in the third calendar quarter of 2021. According to Ali Kani, vice president and general manager of Automotive at NVIDIA:

“The acquisition is an endorsement of DeepMap’s unique vision, technology and people. DeepMap is expected to extend our mapping products, help us scale worldwide map operations and expand our full self-driving expertise.”

The latest release of Visual Studio Code 1.57 includes updates such as Workspace Trust, a new getting started experience, remote repositories and much more.

Workspace Trust lets users decide whether their project folders should allow or restrict automatic code execution and enables safe code browsing. What is more, the new Edge browser debugging feature integrates the Microsoft Edge Developer tools directly into VS Code.

• The new FIDO Developer Challenge invites teams to use the public FIDO2 WebAuthn API to showcase unique FIDO authentication ideas.

The FIDO Alliance stated that the projects should apply FIDO authentication protocols to address technical or social challenges within Fintech, eCommerce, IoT, retail, blockchain, gaming and education. The deadline for entry is July 2nd.

• The new Powered by Snowflake program is specifically designed to accelerate the ability of companies and application developers to deliver differentiated applications through all stages of the application in Snowflake’s Data Cloud.

The program will allow users to build better applications with faster engineering velocity by leveraging Snowflake design resources and will also drive awareness and adoption by co-marketing with Snowflake.

Those who participate in the program will also be able to optimize performance by working with support engineers who specialize in app development.

• The new version of TMS WEB Core includes package support to easily create custom components, Workspaces that allow users to manage multiple projects in one folder, and support for the use of the entire FNC component suite.

Using TMS WEB Core, modern client-side web applications can be created exclusively with the Object Pascal programming language without the need for HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

All new components and improvements are now available to Visual Studio Code users.