News

Syncfusion Dashboards Visualize Big Data

• By David Ramel
• November 18, 2015

Enterprise development company Syncfusion Inc. has come out with a platform for creating interactive business dashboards featuring data visualizations that can be shared on Web servers or embedded within applications.

Developers can use the Syncfusion Dashboard Platform to create the modular dashboards with a drag-and-drop designer interface, using a collection of widgets -- such as charts, gauges, maps, treemaps and grids -- to provide visualizations. Along with the widgets, more than 40 code expressions are available to transform data with operations such as joining tables, filtering, and hiding or adding expression columns. The dashboards are rendered in HTML5, so they can be viewed and managed through a Web interface on local or cloud servers, or they can be shared as embedded components within business applications.

"Business users and developers alike have demanded an all-inclusive dashboarding solution that simplifies data visualization," said exec Daniel Jebaraj in a statement yesterday. "The Syncfusion Dashboard Platform leverages our years of experience providing robust UI components and our recent work in streamlining the complex, messy processes behind preparing and organizing Big Data into significant information that business leaders can use."

As a vehicle for presenting Big Data visualizations, the new tool can be integrated with the Syncfusion Big Data Platform, providing Hadoop on Windows. That integration lets developers leverage the Big Data Platform's collection of Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) tools.

The data to feed the dashboards can come from various sources, such as Microsoft Excel, CSV, relational databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and Apache Spark. "Data from virtually any format, including a mix of structured and unstructured data sources, can be imported into HDFS and be easily transformed into the desired format before visualizing as dashboards," the dashboard Web site states.

To host the dashboard server, systems must provide NET Framework v4.5 and Microsoft SQL Server 2008 or greater. A free community license is available, with other pricing details available on request from Syncfusion. Developers can try out dashboard platform functionality with an interactive demo that lets them sign in as guests to work with existing dashboards or create new ones.