We sat down with Syncfusion VP Daniel Jebaraj to hear his thoughts on the Essential Studio® 2016 Volume 3 update. Find out what he thinks is the most important update to Essential Studio®, something he’s excited to share with customers, and a hint at what he’s looking forward to for the next release. To learn more about the update, including new tools for Xamarin, ASP.NET, JavaScript, UWP, head to the What’s New page.
So, the update that I think is the most important is the Xamarin platform update, something that we’ve been really excited about. A lot of our enterprise customers have applications that have been developed with C# over the years and they’ve kind of had their share of troubles porting them to support all of these multiple mobile platforms. The Xamarin platform makes that a snap. You just write with C# and you will be able to deploy it to iOS or Android, and support all of those different platforms with one code base. We’ve particularly been excited in kind of really seeing those use cases and being able to adapt, and deploy a variety of controls to that environment. The PDF viewer is something that we have had on the desktop and on the mobile client for a while, and we have ported that to the Xamarin environment. We also have a kanban control panel there, and a sparkline. So, that’s probably my favorite, most exciting update.
I think beyond the products, with each update we’ve kind of moved closer and closer to making the product more universally available to a broad audience. So, we started with the Community License several years ago and that’s been received really well. We have thousands of customers using the product under the terms of the Community License. More recently, we’ve also moved to an unlimited license model where you pay one flat, really, you know, reasonable fee per year and you get to use the entire platform, both for building custom applications and also for building and consuming enterprise applications such as the Big Data Platform or the Dashboard Platform. I find that really compelling. You know, that makes it really come home in a way that you cannot easily obtain from any other source, basically.
So, we’ve been really excited about what’s coming in Volume 4. It’s slated for the end of November. One of the things that I’m super excited about is, we worked on a set of Java libraries. Not going to really talk too much about it, but it’s coming in the Volume 4 update – hopefully not going to be delayed or anything. So that’s something that’s super exciting for us. We’ve always kind of wanted to offer that to our enterprise customers. A lot of our enterprise customers have a healthy mix of Java and .NET code, so this makes it available to those customers who also have a pretty solid Java stack running. We’re also very excited about the entire data stack as a whole, the Big Data Platform, the Dashboard Platform. More recently we’ve added the Data Integration Platform that’s currently in beta, but will be shipping soon. We have numerous updates around the data stack. We will be doing more visual analytics kind of updates, making it easier to build models, making it drag-and-drop to visualize your data and to also build those models, and then to be able to deploy those in a seamless manner. So that’s all coming in the next few months, so we’re really excited about those as well.