Looking back
2024 was the most fruitful year for content and learning materials creation. Jmix and the former CUBA Platform have always relied on detailed documentation, guides, and videos to deliver knowledge. Developers have said that CUBA Platform documentation could be used as a self-service learning course for software engineering. Now, developers can get even more, as we’ve delivered 3x times more technical content in 2024 vs 2023. Beyond that, the Jmix team launched 2 new learning courses on Udemy and rolled out AI Assistant. We’re proud that Baeldung, as a respective learning resource for Spring developers, published a tutorial about Jmix adoption.
We aim to simplify the first steps and let developers with various skill sets easily access the technology whenever they need to build a business data app or a digital SaaS product. In 2025, we’ll continue intensively generating new feature-focused content and delivering sample apps to give you more ideas about implementing Jmix tech in real-life business cases.
From a tech perspective, we’ve passed an important milestone - released Jmix Studio tools for consuming external REST API and rolled out a powerful REST Data Store concept. Both functionalities still need improvements, but significant tech decisions were made. Since Jmix 2.4, you can create distributed systems consisting of multiple interconnected Jmix applications with minimum effort. Generic REST API and REST DataStore add-ons enable developers to simplify data sharing across multiple applications, providing a seamless user experience when interacting with entities from different parts of the distributed system. If you still haven’t tested the REST DataStore functionality, follow this guide and find the new streamlined approach for building scalable and modular enterprise applications with Jmix.
In response to modern business requirements for the UI, we introduced brand new UI components: Kanban and Virtual List. Your apps may now deliver better interactive capabilities for team collaboration and mobile UI support.
Progressive Web Applications (PWA) have become an option for business applications since the Jmix 2.x generation. There is no need to support various mobile platforms, learn new tech stacks, and have minimum maintenance effort across the installation base, as PWAs are still web applications optimized for the mobile experience. To assist Jmix developers with PWA development, @Mario David released a series of learning materials, including a Wind Turbine sample app, a step-by-step guide, and a technical whitepaper covering the benefits and tradeoffs of building PWA business apps.
Looking forward
While some open-source techs are switching back to proprietary (and back to open-source again), we remain consistent with our existing licensing model and deliver the Jmix framework under Apache 2.0. New business add-ons, bringing ready-made features, will be offered under a commercial license. Thus, there will be no changes. We remain confident in our current business model. Recently, we changed subscription prices to compensate for inflation and cover the growth of associated expenses. Now, everything is balanced, and the team has resources for community support and product value growth.
For newcomers
A simple-first approach to web development is gaining traction, and we expect that to continue in 2025. The promise of reduced complexity of modern Spring Boot development with Jmix remains actual and drives the growth of our community. Thus, we know newcomers may still face difficulties when adopting the technology. As we stay keen on democratizing Java and Spring Boot web development for software engineers, we will roll out new Jmix features in 2025, helping adoption and getting the first results faster. Here is the list of top 3 priorities:
- AI Assistant integration in Jmix Studio for better prompting involving your project context.
- Improved reverse-engineering feature supporting not only DB but also OpenAPI project generation.
- New view templates in Jmix Studio providing more enterprise layouts.
Our team was impressed by the support of the Jmix AI Assistant initiative, which now runs over 800 questions weekly—many thanks to all early adopters and testers. We continue working on integrating AI Assistant in Jmix Studio and improving the quality of answers. In the end, the Jmix developer will get a contextualized assistant in Jmix Studio who knows about the business domain of your project and can help you manipulate the code instantly. They say - English is the new coding language*) Imagine - you tell Jmix Studio you need a CRM project to manage custom software project sales with UI and press generate. After that, you review the project and make some modifications. Your CRM project is ready for demonstration. Combined with the unified Jmix project structure and powerful dev toolchain, it will look brilliant! This is a vector for our future Jmix Studio engineering effort, and we’ll try to bring this to life.
For regular developers
We plan impressive improvements for regular Jmix developers. The top priority is developing the end-to-end testing tool, aka. Masquerade 2.0. The Jmix team intends to deliver this in the next Jmix 2.6 release and transfer all the Masquerade 1.0 capabilities. With this feature, we’ll close the missing item for producing high-quality software with Jmix.
The next thing is the Jmix Studio feature named “Performance Tips.” We know it may be difficult for developers to anticipate how some Jmix framework configurations can affect the application in production. Thus, we decided to help developers avoid potential pitfalls by making some hints in the Jmix Studio about possible side effects on performance. Picture this. You make changes in the view descriptor of the list view and set the data loader read-only parameter to the false value. At this moment, Jmix Studio shows you a hint: “Well, this will let data context of the list view perform read and write operations every time you do manipulations in runtime. This may slow down the performance x10 times. Think twice!”. It will work like a guardrail for you. Sounds cool!
Finally, we will improve the Jmix security subsystem, making it the best-in-class enterprise development platform supporting all top-popular security providers. It will include updates in the role designer tool and a new SAML integration add-on. The Jmix team understands that configuring enterprise security is a real challenge and can take up to 30% of total project development time. Thus, we want to make Jmix the most productive and easy-to-use tool to do this job with fewer errors and following best practices.
For a better look and feel
Group Table is the missing gem in Jmix 2.x. It was a pivotal point for former CUBA Platform users when deciding to adopt the technology. In 2025, the Jmix UI team plans to deliver Group Data Grid and close the gap between Jmix 1.x and Jmix 2.x in terms of beloved by the community UI features. Group Data Grid will be reworked according to the Jmix Flow UI concept, but we promise to make it awesome.
As the community finds it valuable to build e-commerce solutions, adding the Card List UI component looks beneficial. It will automatically present items as thumbnails and improve the user experience when navigating the product or some digital asset catalogs.
Finally, we plan to add the Jmix Studio tool, which will allow us to simplify the integration of new JS components. We have already provided examples in the UI Samples and documentation. But it still needs a lot of boilerplate code to be written, and thus, it is not aligned with our Less Code concept*) The new tool will automatically generate boilerplate code, reducing developer effort and errors.
For business
Business add-ons are crucial when building enterprise applications and evaluating the platform as part of the corporate platform engineering initiative. In 2025, we plan to improve BPM and Reports, which are the top-rated business add-ons according to the 2024 statistics. In H1 2025, we’ll continue researching the enhancements list and announce it publicly in July 2025.
We also plan to bring the Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) tool as a Jmix runtime add-on. Our customer success team gets feedback that when users start working with Jmix BPM and Report runtime tools, it is difficult to manage the entity model structure without opening additional DB tools or Jmix Studio. With the ERD tool, users will observe the whole data model in the Jmix application runtime and implement new features much faster and with fewer errors.
For platform engineering teams
We see a growing trend across large enterprises and development teams building Internal Developer Platforms (IDP). The main thing platform engineering is trying to accomplish is to offload the cognitive burden that developers meet while attempting to ship software. Surprisingly, this is the same as what Jmix is struggling for! In past years, platform engineering was primarily focused on DevOps, but recently, the scope was extended to the dev tools.
Jmix capabilities can help developer teams standardize the dev tool sprawl in enterprise applications development, which are almost typical CRUD applications. In 2025, we’ll perform R&D to introduce a new Jmix IDP CLI concept. We plan to demonstrate a tool that will generate CRUD Jmix applications based on the OpenAPI file and DB schema without launching the IntelliJ IDEA. We’re experimenting with this feature and will keep you informed if we succeed. If you’re interested in this functionality, you can also send us a request to conduct a demo when it is ready or share your ideas.
For CUBA Platform users
Previously, we announced that since March 2025, the free support of the CUBA Platform would be switched to commercial support until the technology EOL. In 2024, we started helping our customers with assisting migration projects, and still, we see a considerable demand in this area. Estimating the effort needed to perform migration activities and some missing UI capabilities in Jmix 2.x, we understand that more time for transition is required. Thus, we decided to prolong the free support of the CUBA Platform until March 2026 with the continuation of free support on the forum. We plan to deliver one more update of the CUBA Platform until this time. Nevertheless, the Jmix team is mainly focused on evolving the Jmix 2.x technology, and we’ve got minimum resources for CUBA Platform support. Don’t hesitate to contact our sales team to discuss possible migration strategies and consider using Jmix consulting services.