Hi Hans,
Great to hear you are looking into Mendix and I think it fits your goals very well, as it allows for rapid development of applications. Rgarding training I would recommend that you start with the mendix introductory online tutorial that you can find here: https://developers.mendix.com/training/#theCourses
You have access to all the videos and they a good job of covering the basics, meaning at the end you will be able to start building your application.
Regarding data migration, Mendix offfers ways to migrate data from existing databases or excel spreedsheets from your old data storage to your new mendix application see for example https://appstore.home.mendix.com/link/app/2888/
Hope this helps,
Andrej
Hello Hans, and welcome to the community.
Since you already know how to program I think you can just start with the modeler and try things out. If you want some guidance check the documentation for some learning lessons. After that just start building it is really not that hard. And when running into problems your welcome here to ask.
Now the other part. First problem is to get the data out of the other two applciations. You have multiple options here. In the appstore there is a database replication module. If you can make a connection to your other databases that might be the way to go. Other quick option would be if you could extract data from the current databases as CSV files. These can be imported again into Mendix. Check again the appstore. Another option would be if you could create a webservice on your current application. Because then you only have to build this once and you can easily sync the data from your current app to the new Mendix app.
And note that you can use a free sandbox to test your Mendix application. It has limitations (10 users and 100 mb data) but this might be enough to test Mendix out to see if it is the sollution for you.
Happy building,
Ronald
Thanks for your answers.
If I were to migrate the data I would have to replace all existing functionality into Mendix alternatives at once. So my preferred option would to "build a webservice on my current application". How would I go about doing that? Let's say I focus on the animal database which is a microsoft sql server database. And are there serious performance or other disadvantages going about that way?