Tech blog

WE have completed the first round of development on our new eXtreme Application Platform, AFX!

AFX takes concepts from our existing open source libraries, optimises them, and re-imagines them as a unified whole.

The result is a streamlined, simplier, yet enhanced platform, designed for next-level enterpise applications. (Watch this space!)

The following table lists the core AFX components, and the libraries they have been built from:

AFX is now set to power our upcoming Apollo eLearning Platform - which we hope to release very soon.

   ___ ____ __ ___
  / _ | ___|  V  /  Apollo eLearning Platform
 / _  | __/ )   (   by Fantom Factory
/_/ |_|_|  /__^__\  v2.0.0

We've released a fun new video for anyone new to SkySpark to find out how to "get started"!

Learn about the overall concepts of using SkySpark and follow our very own engineer, Chuck, as he sets out to start using it for the very first time.

We hope this will help businesses to understand more about required skills and training this technology stack needs.

We're proud to be finalist in the UK Building Controls Industry Association 2023 awards for our Contribution to Training.

The judges will consider our success with Haystack Essentials alongside applications from other industry heavyweight organisations and we'll find out on 4th May.

Cross your fingers for us!

During a collaborative project, a client tasked us with solving a SkySpark issue with a control loop instability. Here's a behind-the-scenes look at how we tackled it:

• We changed a rule to run only when specific fans are running
• We ruled out false positives by making sure a damper position cannot return a value less than an associated set minimum.
• Added checks for the status of a fan to determine whether or not to create a Spark.
• Fixed existing unfinished tests and added new tests for minVal damper point and fan running checks.
• Deployed new rules and fixed some incorrect targeting.

Plenty of testing confirmed we'd resolved the issue and we succeeded in making our client very happy!

Submitted Pull-Requests to the official Fantom-Lang GitHub repo to stub out the native Java Peer classes in the core "dom" pod.

This allows AFX to supply its own server / Java version of the "dom" pod to enable full, round-trip client-server-client style unit testing for Fantom web applications.

An industry first! https://github.com/fantom-lang/fantom/pull/16

A library for querying XML documents by means of CSS 2.1 selectors.

Sizzle Documents may now be updated to reflect changes in the underlying XML / DOM document, and query results may also be filtered to constrain elements to a given parent.

Try it for yourself! Visit the Fantom Eggbox Pod Repository

The story is now complete!

You may have noticed our storytelling was a little, well, "lacking" in our new course.

Thankfully, our in-house illustrator Morgan has now saved the day and we have released the final touches to our dramatic Destination Mars comic-style story!

Try it out (again) - it's completely free after all!

How to access Destination Mars!

We are celebrating a new exciting eLearning release - Destination Mars!

And even better - it's absolutely FREE!

As STEM UK and International Mars Society ambassadors we are proud to release this public education to help raise awareness of space exploration and colonisation efforts on the planet Mars.

We hope to inspire more people to get involved with digital skills and roles which can be applied to exciting space careers or even to existing industries involving, say, environmental technologies and Smart Buildings perhaps!

Thank you everybody for another fantastic year for Fantom Factory!

We've summarised all the amazing things you have helped us to achieve in 2022 in this quick video - available on YouTube:

We're celebrating the holidays with a unique video - our Fantom Factory Christmas Special!

Take a look behind the scenes of how we make tutorial and training videos at Fantom Factory! The struggle is real!

Available on YouTube:

This release sees a small fix for non-English browser locales:

• Bug: Fixed HTTP "Quality Value" parsing error that could affect browsers with non-English locales.

Visit HTTP Client on StackHub

We've added vital support for Axon components!

• New: Axon Encryptor now encrypts Axon Components and rules.
• New: Added encryptComps option to cmd-line, Fantom Task, and UI settings to disable the new Axon Component encrypting feature.

Read our release notes on StackHub.

We've made some changes to how the Eggbox (Fantom pod repository) website parses Fantom and Fandoc.

Browse our Eggbox documentation - ON EGGBOX!

We've updated our toolkit inline with the latest Project Haystack tagging methodology to include new data tags into our Arcadia training data.

• haystackWriteLevel is now a tag on our (Drill Depth SP)
• a pointWrite endpoint

For more information on the toolkit see our March 2022 article

Improvements to our online shop pages.

We fixed up some broken links to our online course page for our free course:

Introducing Haystack

We have enhanced this new version of Http Client Ext with several changes, including a rework of the HTTP/1.1 Keep-Alive functionality.

• Bug: Fixed a UTF-8 sizing bug with high-end Unicode characters

See the documentation for details.

A client tasked us with creating an application in SkySpark to monitor an maintenance inventory flow between their SkySpark sites and equipment.

We created and delivered an application entirely in Axon, making this simpler and easier to support internally going forward and made our client very happy!

Read our client reviews

A new SkySpark release! We were happy to test and update 12 custom SkySpark extensions for a valued client to make sure they can upgrade to the latest SkySpark version - v3.1.6.

We've released a new video to showcase all of the different types of views and dashboards that you could achieve with SkySpark!

Our video shows how you can customise displays inside the SkySpark application - or add your own unique and luxurious front-end instead.

Available on YouTube:

This new version of our Kaiterra Cloud Extension is now compatible with SkySpark v3.1.4+ - complete with new Haxall library support and using the SkySpark Trace view.

See the documentation on StackHub for details.

Our v1.1 release for the Pelican Cloud extension adds compatibility with SkySpark version 3.1.4+ and we have included more improvements like:

• New: Support for the new SkySpark "Trace" view.
• New: Slave devices now appear in their own folder in the learn tree.
• Chg: Refactored everything internally to be a Haxall Lib.

See the full documentation for details.

We've released a new immutable version for JsonRpc to use with our upcoming AFX eLearning platform. (More news on this coming very soon!)

Discover more about JsonRpc website documentation.

Improvements to our online shop process.

Now when purchasing an eLearning course in our online shop, your access codes will be printed in our recommended learning order!

Improvements to our MARS eLearning platform.

• added improved functionality for admins to view student accounts to more easily assist with issues and bug reports.
• added a course expiry date to help students see at a glance how long they have left to complete an eLearning course.

We were happy to test and update 12 custom SkySpark extensions for a valued client to make sure they can upgrade to SkySpark v3.1.5.

We are happy to announce another successful delivery of a large number of SkySpark rules and Axon functions for a major client.

A robust install and migration script ensured they were delivered and setup remotely, fuss free, first time, and with no interaction from us!

We've released even more improvements to our afJson library. (A customisable Fantom to Javascript Object Notation (JSON) mapping library for use with fully fledged Fantom domain objects.)

It goes far beyond the usual JsonInStream and JsonOutStream classes by mapping and instantiating fully fledged Fantom domain objects.

Discover all the features in the summary or read the full release notes

We've made some minor improvements to afMongo - just for you!

Read the release notes here

Announcing our new Fantom library - JSON-RPC!

An implementation of the JSON-RPC v2.0 specification.

JSON-RPC is used by the Language Server Protocol (LSP) to serialise messages. Use JSON-RPC to invoke methods on a class instance.

Discover more in the official website documentation.

New updates released for our amazing Morphia library (an Object Relational Mapper between Fantom and Mongo).

Read all about them in the official release notes.

STEM FUTURES is now here! https://www.stemfutures.uk/

Our new Fantom website will deliver award winning eLearning for adult retraining - specifically around the digital environment.

• Look out for more details on this coming soon in 2023!

As many of you will know, we provide synthesised training data through our "live" connector.

Using this data for our training scenarios requires SkySpark Rules to be used - which means... uh oh... Axon functions! We provide these Rules in our handy (and free) SkySpark extension - the Arcadia Toolkit.

Now for the first time, we have released our Axon Functions in a plain text format to help you work with our training data - without using the Arcadia Toolkit extension. Copy and paste to your heart's content!

Read more about how to use our Arcadia Functions.

Added new section to documentation, "How to... use custom icons". Thank you to Samuel Nelson for the idea.

PodBuilder may now be used by Users with a SkySpark Admin role; previously PodBuilder was restricted to the SU role. Thank you to Carlos Garcia Pastor for the suggestion.

PodBuilder now gracefully handles the case where doc tags do not have string values. Thank you to Farhang Razzaghi for reporting.

Did you know we made the official training for Project Haystack data modelling?

We unveiled the wonders of our Haystack Essentials eLearning course to the Project Haystack community at this year's Haystack Connects event.

Our video presentation explains the details of what to expect from this handy training - enjoy!

We are very excited to announce our collaboration with the EntroCIM team to produce the new data analytics course - EntroCIM Analyst!

Access EntroCIM Analyst eLearning today!

And even more good news! This eLearning also has its own JOURNAL for long term access to training materials!

Use our hosted EntroCIM instance to find real training data for the course exercises.

Protect your web application from harmful bots and spiders!

In this updated release for hCaptcha, the "invalid-or-already-seen-response" error code is treated as a capture failure, not an error.

See the hCaptcha on Eggbox for more details.

We take our role as technical communicators very seriously and this includes how we use our marketing website as well as eLearning! Our team decided we can do better with our message and our services - so we're working on it right now!

Today we released new versions for our Home, Software Services, eLearning Excellence, and What is Alpha Colony? pages.

Take a look and let us know what you think!

In this updated release for our Pelican Cloud extension, we have now included support for:

• Thermostat Slave devices
• Zone Controllers devices
• HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive Pipelining

See the documentation for details.

Special thanks to Nathan of Trove Consulting for all the testing help!

In this new release of our officially endorsed Kaiterra Cloud extension, we have now included support for HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive Pipelining.

See the documentation on StackHub for details.

Our creative team has been busy with another new video! This time to showcase the wonders of our new Pelican Cloud Extension for SkySpark - available now on StackHub

You can watch it now on YouTube?

Announcing the release of our brand new Pelican Cloud Extension! Another highly optimised SkySpark connector for the Pelican OpenAPI / Climate Control API to efficiently synchronise SkySpark data points from your Pelican devices.

See StackHub to learn more.

We were happy to help a returning customer with their SkySpark data.

In a shared collaborative project with a New York energy company, we used our software development expertise and dedicated strategy to testing, to make it easy to deliver and deploy a suite of custom SkySpark Rules.

Using our Fantom expertise, we worked on a collaborative project with a returning SkySpark OEM client to successfully update a suite of pods for their product.

Now their edge devices can benefit from the new Haxall Serial Comms extension.

We are very happy to announce our new business affiliation with the ISTC!

Fantom Factory on ISTC website

The ISTC is the largest UK body representing information development professionals. It promotes better scientific and technical communication by:

• Encouraging professional development
• Sharing best practices and standards
• Providing research resources
• Providing networking opportunities for its members and industry affiliates
• Promoting technical communication as a profession
• Continuing professional development (CPD)

Keep your fingers crossed as we enter this year's UK Technical Communication Awards.

We've joined the UK GBC as an Innovative Startup Member!

Fantom Factory on UKGBC website

Watch this space for more exciting innovative solutions we want to propose in the future.

We updated our Home page content to add the new promotional video about our storytelling approach.

Look for our Mars 2052 video!

Watch our exciting video on the Fantom Factory YouTube channel and learn WHY we're considered such innovative and engaging storytellers!

Initial socket connections are now subject to an exponential backoff on connection errors, making re-connections after a failover more robust.

Read the full release notes to learn more.

Created a new plugin extension for a returning client to use with our HTTP Client Extension in SkySpark.

It enables secure and seemless continued authentication with CxAlloy TQ REST API v1.0.

We revised our Software Services page to help showcase how we can best help you.

Very excited to be invited to the Forest Rock event in Loughborough this year! It was great to showcase our SkySpark services to the UK community.

Updated with tweaks and fixes for running Mongo against clustered Atlas DB environments.

Read the full release notes here.

Added new section to documentation, "How to... use custom icons" - Thank you to Samuel Nelson for the idea.

SkySpark Analyst is now bigger and better than ever thanks to the recent updates to bring this up to SkySpark version 3.1.4.

Our hosted SkySpark instance for students to use real training data is also using this latest version.

And even more news! This eLearning now has its own JOURNAL for long term access to training materials!

Access SkySpark Analyst eLearning

Updated this free course to unlock the final checkpoint quiz AFTER the final topic.

This makes it much easier to access all the details for further Project Haystack learning.

Just like Haystack Essentials for example!

Updated Mongo with some bugfixes and general "tweaks"!

Read the full release notes to learn more.

Added workaround for non-UTF-8 characters in MongoDB err msgs. See issue SERVER-50454 for details.

Read the full release notes here on eggbox

Don't you just hate it when you click on a link and it automatically downloads a file to your computer? Hands up if your Downloads folder is massively overloaded and horrible to search through!?

We appreciate that our students REALLY want to share their shiny new training certificates.

So, to make life easier, we've implemented an option to EMAIL certificates to any chosen address! (Now there is no need to go looking in those dark places!)

Our new account activation page now helps to explain how our platform uses gamification and immersive story scenarios for enjoyable training and long term memory retention.

Updated our SkySpark Viewbuilder course with minor improvements to question wording. Thanks to everyone who sent in some feedback - every little helps!

SkySpark Viewbuilder eLearning

Eggbox is now updated, released, and live and is now using the latest Fantom Factory Mongo drivers.

This replaces legacy Map Reduce algorithms with speedy Aggregation queries to make the whole repository website snappy and responsive.

Try it for yourself! Visit the Fantom Eggbox Pod Repository

As a bespoke piece of web design work, we designed and created a web application that automatically authenticates requests from PG&E data to allow customers to share their data.

Announcing an even bigger and better version of Mongo than ever before!

This new version adds multi-document transactions and re-tryable writes, making it feature complete with incredible functionality.

Read the full release notes here on eggbox

We created a new video to introduce our amazing SkySpark Viewbuilder eLearning.

Watch it now!

SkySpark Viewbuilder will teach you everything you need to know about creating custom dashboards in SkySpark!

We are all very pleased here at Fantom Factory to successfully deliver on a new eLearning course for the Project Haystack organisation.

Haystack Essentials is the official elearning to understand how to use Project Haystack tags for data modelling.

A newsletter was sent out to our audience about the official launch of our new Haystack Essentials eLearning.

Read more about Haystack Essentials

Improved the performance of large (32KB+) Axon functions by formatting them as a single "multi-line" Axon string.

Read the release notes on StackHub.

Released Haystack Essentials; a detailed training course on how to use Project Haystack tags to create data models.

It also comes with a Journal for referencing key notes and links after the training is complete.

Read our news article or click visit the course page.

To utilise the new official Fantom build release v1.0.78 we bring you the new and improved Windows Fantom Installer!

Now you can take advantage of the new Fantom APIs including one for 2D graphics!

Enjoy!

Announcing the release of our brand new Kaiterra Cloud Extension!

Connect any Kaiterra device to your SkySpark instance easily through the power of the Kaiterra cloud.

Our SkySpark extension is officially endorsed by Kaiterra and is available on Stackhub now. You can even try it for free with the official Kaiterra test device data!

See the documentation for details.

A new SkySpark release! We were happy to test and update 9 custom SkySpark extensions for a valued client to make sure they can upgrade to SkySpark v3.1.4.

New version 2.1.8. release of Http Client Ext (our bespoke implementation of the HTTP protocol for SkySpark v3.1.x.)

• Bug: Fixed an issue with HTTP Cookie path matching. Sticky Cookies may not have been set / re-sent when they should have.

See the documentation for details.

Announcing the new hCaptcha Fantom library!

Want to protect your web application from harmful bots and spiders? But want to support charities instead of a faceless, corporate empire?

Then hCaptcha is for you!

This new Fantom library from Fantom Factory helps integrate the hCaptcha API into your BedSheet web application.

See the documentation for details.

Announcing a new Morphia IoC v1.0 Fantom library!

This mini-library bridges the gap between Mongo, Morphia, and IoC to supply injectable services, Collections, and Datastore for IoC based applications.

See the official release notes for details.

The new v2.0 Object Mapping library for MongoDB is here!

Morphia is an extension to the Mongo library that maps Fantom objects and their fields to and from MongoDB collections and BSON documents.

Based on the popular Fantom Factory JSON library, this major update increases performance and shuns IoC to make Fantom to Mongo Object mapping accessible to all.

Find all the details in the official release notes.

The new v2.0 Fantom driver for MongoDB is here!

• Developed against the MongoDB Stable API v1 (introduced in MongoDB 5.2+)
• Compatible with Amazon DocumentDB
• Compatible with MongoDB 3.6+
• Support for Replica Set connection URLs
• Easy to use Query DSL
• Pooled Connection Manager for multi-threaded use and automatic connection failover
• Pluggable authentication with a default SCRAM-SHA-1 over SASL implementation
• Re-written for compatibility, simplicity, and performance.

Read the release notes here to find out more.

A complete re-write of the Binary JSON library that is the cornerstone of the Mongo database.

The BSON library provides datatypes, pretty printing, and low level serialisation for communicating binary data with Mongo databases.

The re-write provides highly optimised reads and writes of BSON documents.

See BSON on Eggbox for more details.

This new 3 minute video showcases all of the best features of our unique and innovative eLearning platform.

View it now on Youtube:

Or see our new website page: Why choose us?

A new achievements page which details the student progress and awards for each course.

This new feature now enables the downloading and printing of certificates in different sizes and automatically generates a public URL to link awards to social media platforms - like a LinkedIN profile. Read more about it in this article.

We also changed the styling in the Dashboard area to make it easy to find the new achievements area!

Updated this Fantom driver for MongoDB to be compatible with the latest Fantom version (1.0.77).

The main improvement is an optimised connection pool for heavy loads.

Lots of minor updates included, paving the way for a potential major "rewrite" coming very soon!

Read the release notes for all of the details.

Created a successful proof of concept which back-ports the Haxall MQTT extension to work with FIN Framework / SkySpark 3.0.29. That was a bit of work!

We created a new website page to showcase all the amazing reasons why anyone should choose (and trust) us!