Editor’s Note: The following is a guest blog post by Johan den Haan, CTO at Mendix. Mendix is a new Pivotal partner that provides technologies for rapid development and deployment of cloud-native, multi-device applications. In the post below, Johan walks through the process of deploying a Mendix app to Pivotal Web Services. For more perspective on the Pivotal-Mendix partnership, check out this video interview with Johan, and make sure you take advantage of the limited time offer.
It’s more important than ever that applications are built quickly, deployed instantly and changed easily. To facilitate that, we see a lot of innovation in each layer of the cloud technology stack, with abstraction and automation in one layer paving the way for the next—from hardware to IaaS to PaaS.
Although Pivotal has tremendously simplified the deployment and management of scalable applications to the cloud, developing cloud-native applications is still challenging and time-consuming. Why don’t we apply the same principles of abstraction and automation that have streamlined deploying applications to streamlining their development? Today’s announcement of the partnership between Pivotal and Mendix combines the power of both.
Mendix provides Pivotal customers with rapid application development capabilities that enable a wider population of users—from pro developers to less-technical citizen developers—to build cloud-native apps without needing to code. Web and mobile apps can be visually modeled in Mendix and deployed with just one click to Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) on premise, PCF on AWS or Pivotal Web Services. This means enterprises can achieve lightning-quick time to market and continuous delivery of scalable, cloud-native apps.
How can you get started? Let’s walk through the process of setting up and deploying a Mendix application to Pivotal Web Services:
How to start
The Mendix Business Modeler is our multi-user modeling studio, where you can visually model your application’s domain model, application and process logic, UI, security, etc. If you’re new to Mendix, sign up for a free account and download the Mendix Business Modeler from our community App Store. Once you have downloaded the Business Modeler, register here to enable the new Pivotal functionality.
Configure Pivotal Settings in the Mendix Business Modeler
Once you’re in the Mendix Business Modeler, you can start building your application. To simplify previewing the Pivotal Cloud Foundry integration, I’d suggest downloading the Company Expenses application from our App Store. Next, you need to connect to your Pivotal Cloud Foundry installation or Pivotal Web Services account to be able to deploy your application. Complete the following steps to configure your Pivotal settings:
- Go to Run > Edit Pivotal Settings.
- Enter your Pivotal credentials.
- Click Next. You will be logged into your Pivotal Instance.
- Enter the following details:
- Click Next. The App will be created in the Pivotal Web Services environment.
Add a Database and Object Storage Service to Your Application
Before deploying your Mendix app, you’ll need to bind a Database and Object Storage service to your application in Pivotal Web Services.
In this scenario, we’ll select ElephantSQL, a PostgreSQL database, as our database service. Mendix supports PostgreSQL and MySQL databases on Cloud Foundry.
In addition, we’ll configure the Amazon S3 object store to enable persistent file storage. Mendix supports S3 and object stores that implement the S3 API (e.g. OpenStack Swift, CEPH).
For more a step-by-step guide explaining how to bind the above mentioned services to your application, view our Documentation.
Deploy your Mendix Application to Pivotal with One Click!
Now it’s time to deploy to Pivotal: just click the arrow for the Run options and select Run on Pivotal.
With just one click, the Mendix app is deployed to the configured Pivotal environment and started automatically. It’s that easy!
What happens in the background is that the visual application model is sent to Pivotal Web Services and the Mendix CF Buildpack turns the model into a deployable artifact. The buildpack is open source and available on GitHub.
As you can see, Pivotal and Mendix are bringing unbeatable speed and agility to application delivery. These capabilities are crucial to enterprises looking to keep pace with growing application demands, and innovate and compete through the delivery of modern, software-driven experiences.
Current Pivotal Cloud Foundry customers can take immediate advantage of these new capabilities. A time-limited special offer from Mendix is available for existing Pivotal customers to build and deploy commercial applications with the Mendix rapid application development platform. Interested companies should contact Mendix directly.
To see Mendix for Pivotal in action, watch the video below:
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