On Progress® MarkLogic® FastTrack™. Q&A with Matthieu Jonglez
Q1. You have announced Progress® MarkLogic® FastTrack™. What it is and what is it useful for?
MarkLogic FastTrack is a React UI development toolkit that enables organizations to build search- and data-driven applications for exploratory data analysis on their MarkLogic data stack.
It allows organizations to truly see all their data and better understand the relationships and dependencies that are critical for their business or industry so they can speed up time to insight to enable faster progress on new initiatives or simply deliver real-time, comprehensive intelligence.
Applications built with FastTrack can help trace back events, more securely track real-time movement, investigate and help prevent fraud or disaster, monitor critical information, uncover connection and association and more.
Q2. What does it mean a “React UI toolkit”?
A react UI toolkit means a library of ready-to-use components that come with built-in features that are super easy and quick to unpack in a web application. UI libraries are the preferred way for building applications today because they save development time and provide developers with professionally-designed UI so they don’t need to spend too much time thinking about how to build a user-friendly experience or match a company’s brand style.
MarkLogic FastTrack comes with customizable, feature-rich components and multi-model visualization techniques for various data types, including relational, graph, time-based and geospatial. Many of the components in MarkLogic FastTrack have built-in accessibility features, so developers don’t need to worry about compliance either.
FastTrack is fully integrated with MarkLogic Server. It builds on MarkLogic’s proposition to provide agile, end-to-end data management— enabling customers to build their own intelligence applications on the same stack.
Organizations can trust the proven MarkLogic enterprise capabilities, including data integration, robust security, scalability, transnationality, data lineage anf governance, backup and disaster recovery and professional support.
Q3. Specifically can you give us some example of how this toolkit can help developers and data users create scalable data exploration and analytics interfaces?
Access to data within an organization is critical. That’s nothing new in our world. The question is: how do you do it? How can organizations empower employees with knowledge in a way that makes sense for them. For analysts, for example, it’s important to have access to clean, quality, consolidated data that represents a single source of truth so they can derive accurate insight. For decision-makers, it’s important that the data is comprehensive but also communicated in a clear, crips fashion that they can understand it at a quick glance. So, the presentation of data is becoming more and more important.
For Data and Analytics leaders, it’s important to not only enable the organization with the necessary insight for better decision-making, but also do it in such a way that doesn’t place excessive burden on their team or require too much reliance on IT.
We tried to address all these challenges with FastTrack. The ready-to-use components enable development teams to quickly assemble the functionality they need and deliver end-user applications much faster than building a UI from scratch. This provides agility and flexibly to meet business needs and requirements for varying scenarios within tight timeframes. The out-of-the-box integration with MarkLogic Server significantly simplifies app development and decouples business logic from the data model with a pre-built data access layer.
The integration with MarkLogic Server also means that organizations can get a complete, fact-based picture of what’s going on. Being a multi-model database and an application server, MarkLogic enables organizations to leverage data from multiple sources and formats, including documents, relational databases, locations, reports, legacy systems and even external applications, and make it fit for consumption in other applications. This ensures all the contextual details and relationships are kept intact as part of the data source and provides the unity and comprehensives of information necessary to drive modern intelligence.
MarkLogic FastTrack has the ability to visualize all the various types of data in a unified UX. The various data components can present data on maps, timelines, networks, charts, grids, calendars and more. Since the components are synchronized, each component serves as a dynamic filter. If we take for example that is composed of a map and a timeline, the data distribution on the map will be instantly updated when the user is exploring the time-based aspect of the interface, say sliding a time bar or selecting a data range from a calendar.
The faceted search, powered by MarkLogic’s proven, best-in-class query capabilities, enables users to search by meaning and quickly narrow down the initial results and explore data at scale, significantly enhacing their experience and ability weed out information they don’t want to have in their view. At the same time, they have the ability to zero in on the smallest details of a specifit data point, giving them as much context as necessary for the exploratory task at hand.
This enables data users and decision-makers to search, explore and analyze all dimensions of connected data in an interactive, visually-rich interface to see a complete picture of what’s going on in their organization or on a global scale. They have full access to the data they need and more importantly, they can combine and cluster data exploration techniques to navigate and understand extremely large amounts of complex data and gain deep insights into underlying patterns and relationships, interpret dependencies and answer sophisticated questions about what, who, where and when.
Q4. What are the key benefits for Data Users?
Data users and analysts finally don’t need to switch between different applications or build DIY solutions just to be able to see correlations between multiple data variables. They can have fast and full access to real-time information with no lost context.
Q5. And what are the key benefits for Application Developers?
Starting with the productivity gains, FastTrack enables application developers to build applications much faster.
We’ve also simplified the development process by including a specific component, MarkLogicFastTrackContext, that talks to the MarkLogic Server and makes fetching data much easier so that even developers with no experience with MarkLogic Server can build high-performance applications on the MarkLogic platform.
The toolkit also comes with sample applications that give a complete blueprint for how to build for common scenarios, scaffold applications and even lift code snippets.
Q6. Is it possible to request a free demo of the Toolkit?
Yes, for more info or to request a free demo visit our web site.
Qx. Anything else you wish to add?
Yes, do watch the on-demand webinar to see MarkLogic FastTrack in action.
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Matthieu Jonglez, VP Technology – Application & Data Platform,
Matthieu Jonglez is a seasoned technology executive who joined Progress as part of the acquisition of MarkLogic, where he was vice president of product management.Previously,he was the chief technology officer and co-founder of Smartlogic, leading the development of the award-winning Semaphore semantic AI platform. He has an engineering degree from the French engineering school ISEN, and is a well-respected architect of complex, large-scale enterprise search, data-driven and semantic solutions. Matthieu works with clients in a broad range of industries such as government, biotech, energy, banking, finance and law on complex information architectures and expert semantic solutions.
Sponsored by Progress