My top favorite Javascript Widgets are...
For my inaugural post on the Mendix blog, I thought I’d share with you a few of my favorite widgets. I’m on Mendix’s professional services team out of our Boston office, and I’ve developed numerous apps in multiple verticals. The various widgets in the Mendix App Store have been instrumental in adding extra functionalities and features, without reinventing the wheel each time.
An App Store with something for everybody
One of the great things about Mendix is how our awesome community has grown and helped contribute to our App Store. The App Store contains lots of modules and widgets that offer tremendous value to developers and business users. For beginners, I highly recommend checking out our example apps to start working on and playing with. For more experienced developers, the App Store is a goldmine of pre-built functionalities, business and technical components such as the email module, login buttons, audit trail and many others.
My favorite part of the App Store content are the widgets; with a click of a button, you can add various functionalities to your app, such as treeviews, form loaders, fusion charts, Google Maps and anything your heart desires. Furthermore, if you are a pro at JavaScript, you are highly encouraged to incorporate your changes into the widget and get published! You can easily find more documentation on how to start with widgets here. Out of the many widgets I have used and tweaked, there are a couple that really stand out for their unique functionality and capabilities.
Without further ado, let me introduce you to my top 5 favorite widgets.
1. Google Maps Widget
The first widget that I worked with was Google Maps. During the Mendix introductory course in my first week at Mendix, I remember vividly incorporating Google maps into my project. It was really impressive how in a matter of minutes, without any prior knowledge of widgets or even Mendix, I created an easy representation of locations. I could input an address and Voila – I immediately got a visual representation of the locations. The icing on the cake is the mobile version of this widget.