A brief history of Qlik Sense Extensions

Software you have been using for years is being replaced, your iPhone is screaming for new updates every month, and new software technologies and frameworks are emerging faster than you can say ‘hello.’

Luckily, from experience, learning these new technologies or frameworks is easier than it looks. They are mostly introduced to simplify our lives by abstracting a lot of stuff of older more complex frameworks or programming languages. The typical goal of the new technologies is to always achieve more stuff in less lines of codes.

At the same time, the increased pace makes it incredibly difficult for large software players to stay ahead of the curve and make sure they innovate their product fast enough to follow the market’s expectations.

But there’s a limit in capacity of how much a company like Qlik can innovate from within. Their talented engineers and developers can only write as many lines of codes and there’s a limit to how many more developers you can hire to accelerate your roadmap: nine women can’t have a baby 👶 in one month either.

API stands for Application Programming Interface and offers developers an interface to programmatically 💻access Qlik’s Engine. Send a dimension and a measure for calculation, and the Qlik engine will return the resulting hypercube. Just like ordering a medium-rare steak 🥩 at some restaurant = Simple.

This move is not uncommon for large software players: the same API Strategy has also enabled thousands of developers to build apps, games and new enhancements for your iPhone that are offered via the App Store. I’ve just looked at my own iPhone X this morning and I realized 80 percent of my time is spent on third-party tools and apps that were not developed by Apple.

As a result, great open-source projects were created on top of Qlik Sense, introducing new visualization types and capabilities that have never been possible in BI tools before.

The ignition of innovation showcased great examples of how Qlik-empowered data analytics can be consumed and how the new functionality and visuals could enrich the existing dashboards and Qlik apps. Also, new server-side extensions combined the power of Qlik with the likes of R or Python for advanced analytics and data enrichment to an extent and ease of use that BI tools have not seen before.

Open Source (OS) projects are there to share knowledge, progress, and value with the community for free, in exchange for improvements in the form of collaboration. It’s a service offering to complement the product and as such is not intended to be used for Qlik Sense apps in production as is and without review.

If your Qlik Sense apps, which are using Qlik Branch extensions, break when upgrading between versions of Qlik Sense, then fixing it becomes your own responsibility. And that’s absolutely fine because OS is there so you can view code examples and get inspired with use cases. Qlik Branch extensions by themselves were never meant to solve your project’s requirements.

But these companies are third parties and do not belong to Qlik. How are you supposed to trust them? What if they suddenly disappear and stop supporting their offered product? What if their product will not be compatible with future versions of Qlik? The lifetime of a Qlik Sense app or project, ideally, is at least 2–3 years — so these questions are all reasonable.

Most of these companies are, of course, official Qlik (technology) Partners. But even then in that case, using their product is an operational risk, especially for enterprise customers. Qlik has to get involved reviewing those partners and their work in the same way Apps get verified before they make their way into the Apple’s App Store.

Qlik Partners participating in this program commit to adhering to Qlik’s standards of supported functionality, security and completeness. As part of this exercise, extensions are formally reviewed by Qlik and need to pass several (automated) quality tests before receiving the seal of accreditation.

The goal is to accredit the quality, robustness and assured upgrades, all in all, giving customers confidence that those trusted developers and accredited extensions can be reliably used in projects and apps alike. On top of that, Qlik also officially commits to providing first line support to those trusted extensions, making implementation questions and supportability much more manageable.

Open-source projects will remain a core innovator and driver within the Qlik community — not all of them will necessarily become part of the program. Instead, TED is an added enrichment to the overall Qlik ecosystem, bridging the gap between open-source and commercially supported products by recognizing high-quality extensions and promoting partners who develop these extensions as a value-add to an already incredibly powerful data-engine.

Qlik Extensions have been playing an integral part in Qlik Sense projects for a long time now. While there was no 100 percent clear path to how extensions should be integrated into projects or the product, just like in Jurassic Park, nature found its way and their importance and relevance has become more material than ever.

While early adopters managed to create fantastic Qlik solutions either by using already available Qlik extensions, or by extending the platform themselves, large customers, especially enterprises, require the confidence and official assurance that third-party, non-Qlik, code can be used reliably and securely in projects and production.

Related posts:

Futurists are convinced that society will change more in the next two decades than it has in the past 300 years. We allow technology to make our lives easier. Like fine electromagnetic roots, it…

I have always looked for opportunities to advance my skills in Web development until I got to know about the Google Africa Challenge Scholarship program in partnership with the Andela Learning…

Bailan los precarios, en la antesala de los mercados.. “El baile de los precarios.” is published by Eira Briel.