Tech blog

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!

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.

A new SkySpark release! We tested and updated 9 custom SkySpark extensions for a client to ensure they can update their clients to SkySpark v3.1.3. smoothly.

Fixed when an absent title caused an error when generating documentation with the SkySpark docgen pod.

Thanks to Group14 and Altura Associates for reporting.

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.

A new internal library for rendering custom HTML layout components as inspired by:

https://every-layout.dev/

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.

Released SkySpark Engineer Journal v1.1. All the try-it yourself exercises have been moved out into their own separate module - making it easier to use.

A unit test runner and assertion functions for testing Axon code.

Re-compiled against SkySpark v3.1.

Thanks go to Stephen Frank of NREL for the nudge.

Click here for more!

A new web page for our SkySpark Core Training is now public - helping to onboard new starters easily!

Updated our Journals to unlock all modules when they have more than one.

Axon Programmer (for Haxall) now has links to the NEW Haxall documentation.

Updated platform to allow old and unused courses to be archived.

Fixed bug whereby tiny usernames could cause an error.

New and improved Toolkit which includes multiple tabs, new documentation and all of the brand new Viewbuilder views!

Check out our new Arcadia Toolkit help page that gives you all the information you need to know for the brand new Arcadia Toolkit v2.0!

Click here to see more!

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.

Updated our analytics platform to be much more performant, and hold 50x less data.

Updated to be compatible with Fantom 1.0.77 and retain compatibility with older versions.

Check it out at Eggbox!

Consolidated all "Try It Yourself" sections into one module, to avoid any distraction from the main reference material.

News articles may now define an "Updated Date" alongside an original "Published Date".

A new SkySpark release! We updated 9 custom software extensions for a valued client to ensure their continued compatibility with SkySpark v3.1.2.

Updated our internal XSD and SOAP libraries to support element base types.

Released the FREE course companion to SkySpark Viewbuilder.

Today we released a new custom tutorial video on StackHub to demonstrate the use of our new Belimo Cloud SkySpark Connector.

Check it out Here!

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

Updated the underlying afHttpClient library to v2.1.6 and fixed a bug where HTTP requests were being corrupted.

We found and fixed an issue in our new Belimo Cloud extension for SkySpark.

The Ping button now successfully updates the connector details for this release.

Our creative team released a free music video for the world to "chill and analyse to"! Listen to tracks like, "Welcome Tomorrow" and "Hub of Stacks" all which are created by our fantastic in-house music maestro - Morgan!

Updated our Belimo Cloud extension for the Fin Framework to be compatible with FIN v5.1.

This connector has also been updated to make use of Fantom Factory's internal Easy Conn framework.

Updated a minor error in our eLearning platform for a difference in course achievements.

How exciting! We've just finalised our first working version of a Kaiterra Cloud Connector for SkySpark.

Now to continue the project and make this ready for a public release!

We are very proud to release "Introducing Haystack" to our eLearning platform. The free introductory training module for the worlds first official Project Haystack digital training.

Here at Fantom Factory we do so much work, that our News and Articles page along with this TechLog, became tooooo long!

So much so, that we had to implement new "Year Selector" tags to cut down the initial page size!

Now only show the past 12 months by default, but the handy "Year" tags let you explore the archives.

Have fun!

Encrypts and obfuscates Axon source code

Updated to be compatible with the latest SkySpark v3.1.2.

Read the story behind this release in our Linked-In article, Fixing SkySpark extensions, encrypting Axon, and protecting your client's code - all in a day's work!

Updated various links to the SkyFoundry website.

Check out our LinkedIn post for the holidays!

A SkySpark connector for the Belimo Cloud.

This updated connector is compatible with SkySpark v3.1.1.

We find this makes it much easier to find the information about our growing eLearning range.

Take a look!

Fantom Pod Manager (FPM) provides a targeted environment for building, testing, and running Fantom applications.

Read the docs on eggbox.fantomfactory.org

Perfect for training teams, reducing your overheads on creating individual orders. We are very pleased to offer our extra training support services for a minimum order of just 10 eLearning seats.

Check out our new YouTube video - all about our new Pod Builder!