Tech blog

Our best selling course SkySpark Engineer is now bigger and better than ever - updated for SkySpark v3.1.8.

We've also listened to all of your feedback and improved several questions in the final assessment and for the Ice Drill challenge in topic 5.7!

Contact us for free trial access at any time.

• New: Pod Builder now allows concurrent users to edit different pod projects.

Thank you to Sherri Simms of ABI Advantage for the idea.

See all the changes in the release notes on StackHub.

A headless browser for testing web sites and BedSheet applications.

• Chg: Treat absolute localhost URLs as if they were relative.

Sometimes it's hard to avoid absolute URLs!

Take a look at afBounce

FormBeam renders Fantom objects as HTML forms complete with client and server side validation.

• The bean instance passed to render() methods is now optional.

Find out more! Visit the Fantom Eggbox Pod Repository

Our team updated 12 custom Fantom pods for a customer to ensure they continue to work with SkySpark 3.1.8. Ahh - relax!

Honestly, it's taken us some sweet time to sort out our email newsletters!

We've added a new sign up feature on our website to tell us who to send our newsletters to!

Stay up to date with Fantom Factory news and events:

Working with a familiar SkySpark client, we were happy to update their ALC connector to be compatible with the latest SkySpark 3.1.8 release.

Our company was proud to sponsor a local education project - the Cardiff Space Academy

Working with Cardiff university, Cardiff High School, and Cardiff Commitment, we provided a space education eLearning course for the Space Academy students. On the final day we met the children in person to go over the course and to hand out certificates and free SWAG!

All part of our STEM Futures eLearning initiative.

We recently reviewed feedback from contributing students and made improvements to our SkySpark Analyst course.

Thank you everyone!

SkySpark Analyst course details

Fantom Factory received a silver award as "Best Veteran Owned Business" for 2023 at the prestigious Welsh Veterans Awards.

This recognises the growth of our company and services as a Welsh business.

(At least since we won the bronze last year!).

It was our pleasure to work with Active Facility Monitoring on a new API extension they requested.

This extension is designed for whitelisted Axon functions to be called via JSON over a standard REST API.

"I am very happy with this API Pod design and it is even more rigid than I first hoped for. Eval is dead. Long live afmApiWhitelist! Thank you so much."

• Ian Habermann, AFM

Working with a new client we were very pleased to deliver a new custom Fantom View for a mini responsive dashboard in SkySpark.

With our Fantom expertise, we are able to do more inside SkySpark screens than most people may be aware of!

Working with Synergy Consulting Engineers we were very proud to release version 2 of their SONICx Dashboard. (Synergy's Ongoing Intelligent Commissioning)

SONICx is a powerful and rich facility performance dashboard for operational data.

Our client was very happy with the results!

On the back of the new SkySpark v3.1.7. release we were very happy to update and test 12 custom extensions we provide for a valued client.

Fixed a typographical error in our SkySpark Viewbuilder course.

Thanks to Jayson Andres for highlighting this.

SkySpark Viewbuilder course details

Space Education for the Next-Generation

We've taken our amazing new space education - "Destination Mars!" and designed a shorter version for the younger audience. All completely FREE!

We hope that Blast Off! will inspire schoolchildren around the UK to start learning about the growing space industry and the global efforts towards actually colonising Mars.

(Yes it's really happening!)

Blast Off! now and take a look

We've launched STEM Futures as a STEM and space education initiative for the school age audience. Our next-generation platform is just perfect for, well, the "next-generation"!

In fact, STEM Futures is supporting the UK Space Tour and the Space Academy Cardiff programme.

All thanks to our specially designed space education courses: "Blast Off!" and "Destination Mars!".

Visit STEM Futures UK

Our eLearning story universe, the Alpha Colony is getting an upgrade!

It's all part of our efforts to bring next-generation eLearning to a wider audience.

Watch this space!

Plastic is a library for dynamically generating and compiling Fantom code.

Here is what we did in this update:

• Removed dependency on BeanUtils
• Added toStr() methods to model classes

Have a look! Visit the Fantom Eggbox Pod Repository

EasyConn provides a framework for creating your own SkySpark Connectors from Axon functions.

• Thanks to Healthy Workers for helping us to develop this.

Visit EasyConn on StackHub

A library for rendering Embedded Fantom (efan) templates.

This update includes two key features:

• The dependency on afConcurrent has been removed - which (neatly) accommodates AFX Fass macros!
• Added a system hook that lets Efan Errs be converted to custom Errs (added for AFX).

Have a look! Visit the Fantom Eggbox Pod Repository

HTTP Client now handles the case where multiple Set-Cookie headers are returned in a single HTTP response.

• Thanks to Altura Associates for bringing this to our attention.

Visit HTTP Client on StackHub

Working for a new client we were very pleased to deliver a (proof of concept) for a new dashboard in the SkySpark application.

This design was submitted to us for a data centre to monitor power use.

Our client was very happy and is keen to progress this further!

Added new Filter box to the Folio View, to help find wanted records.

• Thank you to Florin Hebean of BAM Energy Systems for suggesting the idea.

Added multiLineCipher and encryptComp options to the Axon Encrytor dialogue.

We've made huge efforts to ensure all of our website policies are up to date and accurate. We're sure noone particularly enjoys reading them, but they can be incredibly important all the same.

In the footer of our website you can find links to our new policies for:

• Terms and conditions
• Privacy policy
• Cookie policy

EasyConn is our idea for a kind of universal connector template - for SkySpark.

It provides the required "Fantom wrapper" for your bespoke connector and enables you to fill out the Axon bits for the authentication you need.

The result is a streamlined, simplier, yet enhanced platform, designed for next-level enterpise applications.

EasyConn is now in beta testing, so watch this space for more news coming soon!

We consider ourselves community champions for Project Haystack.

But WHY? - we hear you ask!

Well, our new video explains all! Watch it now on our YouTube channel:

Fantom Factory is now certified in the Cyber Essentials scheme - as recognised by the UK Government as a business standard for Cyber awareness.

Read more in this news article link

Fantom Factory is the proud winner of the 2023 award for:

Technology Training Consultants of the Year!

Hooray! We are thrilled our team has been recognised for another year of hard work!

Read all the details in our news article here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.