Widget development - Any teachers available?

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Hi everyone, for my personal growth I want to invest time in learning how to make widgets inside Mendix, I constantly run into the issue having new widget ideas or functional requirements. But each time I decide to dive into it just feels like I run into the same issue. A lack of understanding. The client documentation often includes one variation which often is the bare minimum code example to display where & how the functionality is used. But often excludes / avoids complex functionality. Just some simple use-case scenarios would be lovely additions to this documentation. The fact that it is also extending dojo/dijit in many cases does my head in when I'm trying to look for what certain functions do. So I've tried looking at other widget's source code and trying to learn from those. But pretty much all widget packages and code written by others are uncommented. Now I'm sure that if i spend enough hours into reading / studying their code I will eventually learn how it works or what it does. But in general it takes a lot of time/energy as a majority of the widgets is just very poorly written, where function names aren't descriptive of what they actually do etc, poor choice of variable names. And often do I come to realisation that these widgets don't do what I need them to do, so then I'm back to the documentation trying to figure out what elements to put together. Now what I'm looking for is one or multiple people that would be willing to fulfill a tutoring / teaching role. And maybe others that would be interested in getting such guidance / tips. I know there used to be a classroom session at Mendix for widget building, but I don't think that exists anymore. So yeah anyone who would be willing to help me and possibily others out would be greatly appreciated.   
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11 answers
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Good news!

 

The show goes on! We will organize a Community Expert Meeting - Widget Edition

Save the date: 1th June @Mendix office

For who: 4 Widget devs only!

 

More details and invite will follow soon.

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Community Expert Meeting : Widget Edition

As MVP widget group, we are organizing a Community Expert Meeting the Widget Edition on June 1st, from 16:00 – 20:00 at the Mendix office Rotterdam. This expert meeting will be focused on widget development beyond the basics. As community, we want to increase our widget development capabilities by sharing knowledge, best practices, and experience.

The following can be expected in this meeting:

  • Code reviews
  • Knowledge and best practice sharing
  • How to approach widget development
  • Technical knowledge
  • Development tools
  • Feedback on your submitted widgets

 

What should you bring to the table?

  • Decent JavaScript knowledge
  • Experience with developing Mendix widgets 
  • One or more Mendix widgets available in a GitHub repository

 

Join us for this first community expert meeting. Limited seats available.

Register Here

See you 1st of June!

Andries Smit

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5

Dear widget developers.

I love the euthosiam about the topic and see that more guideance would be greatly benefit the whole community.

Let's try; if we can get the Community team, MVP's and Mendix training department  get together to organize a session for current widget developers that want to share theire knowledge.

I am willing to participate by doing some code review on published widgets and present some best practices.

Cheers,

Andries

UPDATE: The show goes on! We will organize a Community Expert Meeting - Save the date: 1th June @Mendix office 4 Widget devs only! More details and invite will follow soon.

 

 

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2

I would participate as well, but first have to walk through theses two:

https://docs.mendix.com/howto7/custom-widget-development/create-a-basic-hello-world-custom-widget

http://ww2.mendix.com/expert-webinar-developing-widgets.html

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Hi Marnix,

Indeed there has been a classroom workshop at Mendix. It isn't scheduled at the moment, since schedule & demand was out of sync. If there are more interested in a workshop, we might try to get it scheduled.

So who's interested? (let's start with the NL region)

Edit: be aware that knowledge of JScript, HTML etc.. is a prerequisites.

Rene

 

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1

I would like to be there as well if the scope goes beyond a basic training and we actually review widgets and dive into best practices. I created a couple of widgets myself and am, as Andries, happy to share that during a session if René is looking for 'victims' ;).

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0

Hi Rene, 

I'm also interested in participating in the workshop and I think a few of my colleagues would be to. 

Jeffrey

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0

I am also interested.

Regards,

Ronald

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I'm interested aswell, and I'm sure more of TimeSeries would be interested!

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0

Hi Rene,

I am interested as well.

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I personally already did the widget workshop the very first time it was available. Looking back at what I learned I think most of that is available through the "documentation" pages right now. So if there is going to be a new workshop I would really like it to be more of a hands-on tutoring experience where there are maybe 1 or 2 expert mendix widget developers that can help realise ideas.

But yeah I'm interested in whatever we can come up with to improve the learnability of creating widgets, because right now I find the learning curve to be a bit steep.

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