In the words of the Fugees; Ready or not, here I come. Be warned though, this will be a wall of text so grab yourself a cup of coffee, sit back, relax and immerse yourself into the world of code and a little history lesson.
A brief history of time
With the release of QlikView 10 we shipped the possibility for developers to build their own QlikView objects using web technologies like javascript, HTML and CSS. These objects could leverage the power of the QlikView association engine, making selections and behave just like standard QlikView charts would. Did you need a specific chart for this specific project? No problem, now you could extend the standard set of charts with something custom and specific just for you.
So was it a huge success out of the gate? Hell no. Not only did this introduce a new skillset that previous was not common amongst a BI team but back then the browser landscape was extremely fragmented and inconsistencies between them was many.
Things started to pick up as QlikView 11 was released (adding support for Document Extensions) and a huge improvement was made both to the documentation and the many examples that started to ship with the product. I guess it was also around this time that things really started moving outside of the Qlik-o-sphere. Infographics, charts on the web and javascript frameworks became more commonplace, normal people’s interest in data spiked and development time on the web was greatly reduced.
Over the years we have seen innovative mapping solutions for QlikView entering the market, lots and lots of new charts has been developed and are available for free and under open source licenses. Mind you this is not something Qlik has developed, we merely produced the tools and the community stepped up and has produced some amazing things.
Fast forward to 2015 and beyond
Charts and data in the real world has become more and more common place, web technologies has advanced tremendously and we are soon reaching an evergreen state of web browsers allowing developers to leverage the greatest and latest features the web has to offer. Visualization frameworks and libraries are popping up everywhere making it easier and easier to chart data which in turn also puts pressure on us, Qlik, to be as open as possible and be able to integrate with these libraries.
Qlik Sense has also been released for almost 6 months and that marked a milestone for us, not only is it a new product but it was also built with the mindset that everything a software developer at Qlik is able to build should be built on an open and documented platform that anyone should be able to leverage.
We no longer make a separation between things built by Qlik and visualizations produced by a partner or a customer, we give each visualization an equal amount of weight.
We also took the opportunity to do a little name change, because naming things are important. No longer is it called Extensions, as in an extension of the product, but instead we simply refer to it as Visualizations.
Enough with the ranting, let’s write some code!
So what skills do you need
A understanding of HTML and CSS
Basic to advanced javascript knowledge
What software do you need
Qlik Sense Desktop
A text editor (Optional)
This video will give you a short introduction to the workbench editor that ships together with Qlik Sense Desktop and showing you how to build your first visualization.
