by James Corcoran, CTO Enterprise Solutions.
Last month we released a number of new features across our enterprise platform and range of developer, data science and visualization tools. Our goal with this release has been to add new features and capabilities focusing on usability, integration, and performance. Our enterprise platform and toolkits continue to be the building block upon which our solutions are built, and we have added over 100 new features that have been requested by our clients and solution engineers in the field. As well as adding new features, interoperability has been a big theme for us in recent years and we continue to add plugins and interfaces to third-party technologies. And, of course, we remain focused on retaining our competitive performance edge at all times.
The release of v4.4.0 of the KX Enterprise Platform contains a number of new features aligned with our strategy to make us cloud-ready, including the introduction of our new Service Class framework which is designed to support elastic scaling for non-deterministic workloads by running pools of data processing nodes without having to predefine them upfront. We’ve also extended our integration with Git (for source code control) and SAML (for Single Sign On and secure authentication) and added Python and Kafka plugins to the platform. Another highlight is the change to our Gateway Query Router component to simplify our architecture and allow for greater control and more efficient execution of high frequency queries.
The KX Dashboards v4.4.0 release contains a number of exciting new features including advanced options for many chart types and the addition of new geolocation map styles. Furthermore, we’ve renewed our partnership with ChartIQ and continue to offer best in class financial charting tools as a native KX Dashboards component. In our bid to further streamline the user experience, we’ve made changes to simplify the menu toolbar and page layout and added pre-configured sample dashboards to the release package as well as a Dashboards Project Template starter-kit. We’ve also released many dashboards ‘recipes’ or short tutorials for rapid dashboards development.
Earlier this year we released our developer tools to the community for free – KX Developer free to all KX users, and KX Analyst free to enterprise users. Following overwhelmingly positive feedback, we have now released v1.1.0 of these tools. Among the highlights of this release is the Command Line Interface (CLI) for developer tools including code profiling, code coverage, editor linting, and markdown documentation generation. This suite of tools can now be easily integrated into engineers’ software development lifecycles. And data visualisations are now available in-IDE as well as within the Data Transformer tool. The KX Developer product remains integrated with the KX Enterprise Platform and is a key tool for rapid solution development.
The KX Machine Learning Toolkit is a resource for all aspects of the machine learning pipeline, including pre-processing, feature extraction and parameter selection. Release v0.1.3 includes new cross validation procedures to automatically split data into training and validation sets, new grid search functions to find the most optimal model parameters, and enhanced integration with Python’s popular Pandas library to enable automatic conversion of temporal data types. One of the most important highlights from this release is the addition of a new distributed processing framework to distribute machine learning algorithms over multiple processes. As well as releasing the framework, we’ve integrated it into some of our existing libraries such as the FRESH algorithm which now benefits from faster performance for feature extraction.
As you can see, it’s been a busy summer here at KX! Our goal is to continue to enhance these products so that we can continue to offer cutting edge streaming, real-time and historical data analytics solutions to our customers and partners around the world.
