DEVOPSdigest

Mendix, a Siemens business, announced the general availability of Mendix 10.18.

The latest release includes new features, performance upgrades, and AI-driven enhancements designed to make software development easier and more accessible.

By combining low-code with the power of AI, Mendix 10.18 provides organizations with:

- AI-powered assistance across the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC)

- Simplified onboarding and software development experience for faster and more productive results

- Better accessibility, visibility, and governance around GenAI output and environments

- Further updates to Maia, the Mendix Artificial Intelligence Assistance built into the platform, improve smart development and make it easier to build and deploy smart apps

The updates demonstrate the company’s commitment to delivering its vision of continuous innovation with new and enhanced features across three main areas:

- Empowering AI innovation to transform ideas into impactful solutions

- Accelerating successful business outcomes with intelligent AI-assisted development

- Enhancing control and visibility for AI best practices in enterprise SDLC

Focus area 1: Empowering AI innovation to transform ideas into impactful solutions

Delivering engaging user experiences and smart applications has become easier for organizations with the launch of new and improved generative AI capabilities in Mendix 10.18 – providing versatility, speed, and governance for smart apps.

Released in limited availability in 10.18, Mendix introduces the Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs to dramatically reduce entry barriers for companies looking to experiment with GenAI technologies or develop intelligent applications for their users. The bundle offers two packs:

- Mendix Cloud Model Resource Pack: allows users to quickly create GenAI instances inside the platform, eliminating the organizational hurdles of setting up their own hyperscaler environment

- Mendix Cloud Knowledge Base Resource Pack: enables users to ground their GenAI models with their own company data for more contextually aware and accurate responses within the Mendix platform

The GenAI Resource Packs provide a token consumption monitor, which offers full visibility into your GenAI spending by tracking usage across individual apps or an entire portfolio for daily, weekly, monthly, or custom date ranges.

Mendix 10.18 ushers in a new in-platform prompt management function, which promotes data science and application development collaboration within the Mendix platform. The new Prompt Management feature has been created to help streamline and accelerate the experimentation process. Users can easily swap between prompts to test the effectiveness and produce the most precise, relevant, and desired output. It can also estimate the token usage per transaction, which helps companies determine if use cases will yield business value.

Focus area 2: Accelerating success with intelligent AI-assisted development

Mendix 10.18 introduces Compass, a new built-in tool for guiding organizations new to low-code through their digital transformation. The tool directs clients through different aspects of digital processes and offers expert onboarding to Mendix’s enterprise-grade low-code development platform.

It also offers further updates to Maia, a set of generative AI-powered services built for smart development. Maia offers guidance, assistance, and generation to Mendix developers and has broadened its capabilities to provide:

- Domain model generation to define new or extend existing domain models using natural language prompts

- Discoverable learning materials for developers who are new to Mendix in Maia Chat

- UI Recommender simplifies and speeds up the process of adding widgets to a page

Other new developer experience enhancements in 10.18 include:

- Better multilingual support for users to communicate with Maia Chat in their native tongue with language detection and response

- The Mendix IDE, built natively in English, is now available in German, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese

- Security Overview designed to streamline the security review process for Mendix applications

- Redesigned App Insights Feedback Module enables user insights to guide development. Customizable UX styling can also tailor the feedback experience to match your brand

Focus area 3: Enhancing control and visibility for AI best practices in enterprise SDLC

Mendix’s mission is to improve governance and visibility throughout the entire software development lifecycle for its clients.

10.18 focuses on ensuring your GenAI is as smart, secure, and cost-effective as possible. The new Mendix Cloud GenAI Resource Packs make it easier for customers to get started with GenAI. Thanks to its in-platform knowledge bases and built-in Retrieval-Augmented Generation capabilities, users can easily ground generative AI models with their own data.

10.18 also introduces Content Filters to safeguard your GenAI applications. The customizable filters help minimize harmful content and address sensitive topics (such as bias, hate, and profanity) by equipping enterprises with tools to detect problematic content and promote consistent, secure, and responsible AI experiences at scale. This comes after growing industry sentiment that some businesses are reluctant to use GenAI because of its lack of regulation and content moderation.

Mendix’s deployment automation tool, Pipelines, uses AI and a new JIRA integration to compare your application models against Mendix’s best practices, ensuring application quality and boosting developer productivity.

Mendix 10.18 provides a secure, efficient, and compliant development ecosystem. A full list of its features can be found here.

“Mendix provides us with the ability to quickly prototype a new feature or behavior,” said Luke Zawadzki, datascalehr’s Head of Engineering. datascalehr is a business services organization that delivered an AI-native payroll platform with Mendix. “This allows us to test drive living, breathing functionality early in the process and discover problems or make adjustments early. It’s great from a development perspective because you can actually deliver what your customers want.”

Hans de Visser, Chief Product Officer at Mendix, said: “The launch of 10.18 comes at a time where GenAI and best business practices are constantly evolving. We are committed to staying ahead of the curve, and a big part of that is providing our clients with meaningful platform-wide GenAI services. All updates directly work towards democratizing access to AI capabilities and equipping users with the necessary tools for success. We will continue to adapt our evergrowing portfolio of services to elevate governance from the application level to the platform level – 10.18 is a step in the right direction, but we’re not done yet.”