Oracle Java SE is a programming language and gives customers enterprise features that minimize the costs of deployment and maintenance of their Java-based IT environment.
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Qlik Analytics Platform
Score 8.2 out of 10
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The Qlik Analytics Platform (QAP) is a developer platform for building custom analytic applications based on rich frontend and backend APIs. It gives full API access to the Qlik associative engine to build rich data-driven analytic applications, for example when building web applications for extranet and Internet deployment.
Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.
If you want to setup analytics dashboards for reporting or simple data analysis then Qlik is your tool of choice.
Complex data structures are handled well, but you’ll need to keep de amount of data on the low side. Integration with other software is possible and easy.
Since Java runs on a virtual machine, it's generally considered to be agnostic of the hardware it's running on. It allows for deployment across a mix of hardware setups with the same binary.
Lots of literature, third party libraries, support forums, and books have been devoted to Java in general, making it a great language to use to support the business.
Backwards compatibility has been an important strength of Java for us. Legacy code that isn't ready to be retired yet can still run on our newer setups despite using older versions of OJSE.
It's flexible in allowing the development of fully-fledged analysis tools and dashboards, but also smaller "widgets" to embed in our websites to bring stories to life, and enables us to develop things once and then re-use them in different contexts.
The development platform and management console are both easy to use, and, with proper data development by our expert developers, can be used by relatively junior colleagues to produce great-looking and very useful products.
The way the platform handles a mix of data sources from different APIs and internal data stores is good.
We like the visualizations and from a corporate perspective find it easy to develop one-size-fits-all visualizations that present a wide range of data items well in a responsive way.
The language is fluent and has good support from a number of open source and commercial IDEs. Language features are added every 6 months, although long-term service releases are only available every 3 years. It would be nice if some of the older APIs were depreciated with more pressure to move to the new replacement APIs (e.g. File vs. Path), but transitions to new features are generally well implemented.
Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.
Qlik is great for companies with lots of business domains and departments because it scales well, especially if data that is reported is saved in SQL and similar structures. Its ease of use and good UI enables business units to create and manage their own reports. That removes a great burden of creating and managing/modifying these pages from the IT team. Overall, it's a win-win for both IT and business units.
We choose Java as our system has multiple sub-applications that have different purposes and architecture including back-end applications, front-end UI, front-end Rest API, and Selenium Automation tests. They are deployed in Windows and Linux, communicate with each other using Rest API, RMI and Queue Message and need to support different deployment environment from Dev, Test, UAT to Production so using Java allows us to have a common standard from development, build and deployment for all applications.
They are all good tools, each having their own pros and cons. Qlik Analytics Platform was easy to set up, more than affordable, and has a good user base. Though not as large as some of the other tools, it is growing every day and for the price, it is very hard to beat. I would recommend it. Microsoft Power BI is a little more intuitive to some users, many of them engineers, because of its similarities to Excel. I do like that it follows a similar structure to Excel but I think that it also has the same old-school GUI, which could be improved on. I prefer the way Qlik Analytics Platform's visualizations look because they appear more modern and smooth rather than rigid.
