Summary: As a provider of Qlik Sense visualization extensions Vizlib promises to blend the innovation and agility of open source with the reliability of commercial software..
The pace of delivery for visualization in Qlik Sense has been disappointing to some. Thanks to rich open APIs in QS, much of the slack has been taken up by the community in the form of open source visualizations as seen on branch.qlik.com. There you can see some remarkable innovation and responsiveness to community requests.
Should you use open source visualizations? An open source extension may provide just what you need in your project. But you should consider the unsupported nature of open source and evaluate the risk and consequences of the visualization possibly failing at some point.
When I worked as a Java developer my team used the open source Eclipse IDE as our main tool. We also used a dozen or more open source plugins. As our plugin library grew, we found that testing and updating plugins between releases was taking an inordinate amount of time, sometimes making us afraid to upgrade the base Eclipse product. We turned to a vendor and purchased a bundled version of Eclipse with dozens of plugins tested, supported and verified. Problem solved.
Vizlib is a new company is promising to blend the innovation and agility of open source with the commercial support that many customers demand. Vizlib is partnering with the best extension authors to produce a library of fully supported high function visualization extensions. Check out some of what they have published so far:
- A Table object that delivers the functionality of a QlikView table and much more.
- Rich Formatting Options just like in Excel/QlikView
- Conditional show & hide of columns
- Dynamic Labels
- Minicharts & Progress Bars
- An Advanced Text Object that provides the full functionality of the classic QlikView text object (including actions!) plus additional functionalities like HTML code and icons.
To date Vizlib has released five visualizations with more on the way. Check out what’s available on the Vizlib download page. A free trial license is offered that allows you to try any of the extensions in your own installation. Take a look!
-Rob