What is an hpaPaaS Platform?

What is an hpaPaaS platform?

According to Gartner, an application platform-as-a-service (aPaaS) is “a cloud service that offers development and deployment environments for application services.” Add in tools for rapid development and delivery, and you have a high-productivity application platform-as-a-service (hpaPaaS).

Did you know?

The Gartner® Magic Quadrant for Enterprise High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service is now called the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms.

How does low-code relate to hpaPaaS?

Low-code and hpaPaaS have overlapping capabilities and can be interchangeably used from a neutral point of view. The idea is that high-productivity platforms employ a visual, model-driven approach that enables a broader range of individuals to build and deploy apps. This approach is proven to reduce time to value and lower development costs while offloading overburdened IT development organizations.

Low-code and hpaPaaS platforms streamline development by offering DevOps teams and professional developers the full transparency, openness, and control that they require. However, some hpaPaaS platforms struggle to provide full control over app resources, support for DevOps, and scalability. Apps can often be limited in functionality. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s possible to have both high productivity and high control capabilities in a single application development platform.

The Mendix hpaPaaS Platform

With Mendix, it’s entirely possible to have both high productivity and high control at the same time. Visual modeling tools cover the full stack of web and mobile app development, including responsive user interfaces, domain models, and business logic. Mendix models are directly executed — developers receive instant feedback on app performance and can collaborate with business users in real-time.

Unlike other hpaPaaS platforms, Mendix isn’t limited to creating simple form-based apps. Mendix apps can be highly sophisticated, leveraging full mobile capabilities as well as advanced technologies such as machine learning and IoT applications. Visual developers have access to a wide variety of existing app templates and components from Mendix and third parties.

Professional developers can further extend their organizations’ building blocks by creating custom extensions in Java, Scala, or JavaScript and packaging them as native model components for visual developers to use. The applications themselves leverage a microservices architecture, with application services that can be exposed via APIs, and data that can be exposed via the OData standard.

Cloud deployment

Deploy apps to the Mendix public cloud, virtual private cloud computing systems, on-premises infrastructure, and a wide range of other cloud platforms — such as SAP Cloud, IBM BlueMix, AWS, and Microsoft Azure. All with a single click!

Built on Cloud Foundry, our cloud back-end isn’t just the most open and portable hpaPaaS on the market — it’s the most sophisticated. Leveraging a modern stateless server architecture, the Mendix Cloud provides on-demand vertical and horizontal scalability and out-of-the-box high availability. Non-technical developers don’t need to worry about any of this. They simply visually build and enhance their apps and think of the back-end as “opaque.” But the Ops team has the transparency and control over the server run-time required to operate with enterprise robustness, at web scale. They can even opt to leverage a container-based approach to DevOps with Docker and Kubernetes.

Rapid development

Rapid application development is often thought of as simply speeding up the build phase; using visual tools to create data entry screens that are connected to enterprise data sources. And with many hpaPaaS platforms, that’s indeed the primary, and sometimes sole, focus.

Solving the productivity challenge for anything but simple disposable apps, however, requires more. You need to ensure app quality and robustness while supporting continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) — traits typically associated with high-control platforms.

Mendix has you covered. Our philosophy is to not only accelerate the build phase (you can, of course, build an app and get it up and running in 10 minutes) but to support and optimize the entire application development lifecycle. The platform includes an Agile project management system that’s easily used by business users, project owners, and IT, as well as a social portal for cross-organizational communication and visibility. Models are automatically checked for consistency during development. An integrated test suite allows you to define, automate and apply tests throughout all stages (development, smoke/sanity, system, regression, etc.).

Performance monitoring offers a detailed view of your apps’ performance and responsiveness in the real world. Mendix is the only hpaPaaS — or hcaPaaS for that matter — to include a Quality and Security Management application, which allows you to proactively measure the robustness and maintainability of your apps and their components — an important task when the range of developers includes professionals and novices. This is directly integrated into the application lifecycle but can be extended or even orchestrated by third-party tools, such as Jenkins, via open platform APIs.

We invite you to explore our Platform in more detail. Take a tour or sign up for free. You can also contact us to talk more about your hpaPaaS needs.