Large application

0
Hi all,  I am in a hybrid industry and we are looking for an erp that would meet our needs and one really doesn't for us. I am thinking about SLOWLY building such an application in mendix but this would take along time. Starting with crm, moving on to track management,  over to project management etc...   My question is if I started this endeavor ultimately this application would get very large and complex... can mendix support large applications and not just smaller short apps. My second question is I really need to plan for that app growth,  any good places to read up planning architecture of app for that size?   I live the idea of just releasing it incremrntally one feature at a time. 
asked
5 answers
0

I've written several very complicated apps in Mendix and it works extremely well.  I've got 2 apps that have more than 600 tables (entities) each with very complicated calculations/relationships.  Size your containers appropriately and you'll have no issue.

answered
0

1. Mendix can support large/complex applications. 

2. Application architecture is quite a big topic and totally depends on your actual use case. If you really have no experience in that field I strongly advice to get in touch with some experts from Mendix or one of the Mendix partners. Consider integration of existing systems.

Building a full ERP solution from scratch with Mendix is going to be a big project, good luck there!

answered
0

I agree with Fabian. If you do not have experience with large apps nor setting up complex architectures, make sure you involve somebody that has that experience. In Mendix it is also very easy to create a very complex, non-maintainable and bad performing app if you don't follow best practices. I've seen those being delivered as well...

I have built fairly big apps in the past 5 years. With multiple clients in the end we chose to make several interacting applications in stead of one big monolith app. Each app serving it's own purpose in the big picture.  That choice came out of some deep dive architecture sessions for all required functionalities and the customer roadmap.

answered
0

Apart from the fact that it would be a large project if you want to build, CRM, Projectmanagement etc i would suggest to create multiple applications (for each part a sperate application) and integrate those with each other. Mendix is really strong to integrate between applications. If in future you decide to use an external application for one of those functionalities it is much easier to split. 

answered
0

Although it might be a very long and windy road to create your completely new  digital backbone from scratch it is an interesting experiment even when only exploring the idea. 

I would suggest to start from the Microservices Architecture style and do some reading from there. 

I like the stuff on https://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html 

What is important to realize if you go for microservices and devops, you might end up building several parts of your new digital backbone with different technology stack, yet all interoperating in the same style.  That would also allow you to re-use parts of e.g. OpenCrm next to other parts you build in Mendix.

Good luck on this challenging journey!

 

answered