Tech blog
Find out what we do all day!
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 HTTP 1.1 Keep-Alive Pipelining and additional device support.
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 for details.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We created a new website page to showcase all the amazing reasons why anyone should choose (and trust) us!
New header, path, and query authentication mechanisms for setting custom values as HTTP headers, URL query parameters, and path segments.
Thanks go to BAM Energy Systems for sponsoring these new authentication mechanisms.
Other new functionality includes a new camelCase option for normalising header names.
Read the release notes for more info!
The functionality around how certificates are awarded has been reworked so we may also automatically provide a Certificate of Attendance!
This enables students to claim credits towards professional development purely for completing our training content. Read more about our certification here.
New Dashboard image for the user home page in our Mars training platform (Mars theme only), complete with a parallax scrolling, rotating carousel of clouds and stars.
New custom slim components let you add, and mix in, custom templates to Slim files.
Click here for more!
We were very happy to successfully complete work on a new and optimised SkySpark extension for a returning client that connects to Chargepoint REST API services via SOAP.
This required us to research and build our own SOAP / XSD libraries - in Fantom, which was hard work but ultimately rewarding! SkySpark v3.1 now connects to, and returns data seamlessly from, Chargepoint.
A new web page for our SkySpark Core Training is now public - helping to onboard new starters easily!
Certificates are now auto-generated using our own PDF creator library and may be automatically downloaded from the Dashboard on successful completion of an eLearning course.
Finally - our SkySpark Viewbuilder eLearning course is now available! 
- Understand view types and layouts
- Add and bind variables
- Create a dashboard with cards
- Explore charts and data
- Style tables and forms
- Use actions with forms and views
- Organise and export your new views
Provides integration with Axon Encryptor and compatibility with SkySpark v3.1.
Re-write of the original Axonator code.
Axon Encryptor runs on SkySpark v3.1, splits the runtime code into its own extension, and provides seamless integration with Pod Builder.
Fantom Factory was a sponsor of this year's SkyPosium 2021.
Although we could not be there in person, we made sure that would not stop us from leaving an impression, by delivering an incredible video talking first and foremost about everything that we do, as well as a little bit about us and our team.
See our article for more details.
Read the amazing backstory of our Alpha Colony! We've released a fun freebie comic book for you to enjoy on our MARS training platform!
We use the Alpha Colony scenario for consolidatory training techniques AND to make these boring subject matters actually enjoyable!
See our LinkedIn post for information, or go directly to our training site and create a free account to access it right now!