Wijmo Roadmap for 2017
It's hard to believe another year of Wijmo has gone by. 2016 was another productive year of development and growth for the Wijmo team. Looking back at our 2016 roadmap, you can see that we delivered everything that we promised. Let's recap some of 2016's highlights:
- We were the first to offer complete Angular 2 support
- Interop support for ReactJS and VueJS
- JavaScript module support including SystemJS, CommonJS and AMD for easier use in WebPack, etc
- OLAP controls including PivotGrid, PivotChart and PivotPanel
- ReportViewer control
- MultiRow extension of FlexGrid
- Sticky headers, Validation and Custom footers in FlexGrid
- New chart types like Waterfall, Sunburst, Radar, Box Plot
- Redesigned documentation system
Most of what we focused on in 2016 was based on you, our customers. Our roadmap is always customer-driven, and 2017 will be no different. We spend a lot of our time working with our customers to understand their use cases and needs. Many of our customers request controls or features directly. We work with them to create requirements, build a prototype and get feedback before releasing publicly.
Key Points
In 2017, we’re focusing on:
- Polishing controls based on customer needs, including performance, features, and fixes.
- Make Wijmo easier to use by improving: tutorials, guides, samples and documentation.
- Adding some major new controls, such as TreeView, PdfViewer and Forms.
TreeView
Multiple customers have asked for a TreeView control this year. We currently have a TreeView in development that will be releasing in early 2017. Our TreeView will include checkboxes, icons, drag and drop support and more.
PdfViewer
We recently released a preview of our PdfViewer control. The PdfViewer uses a server-side engine to render PDFs and send SVG to the client for display in the viewer. Our PdfViewer will ship in mid-2017.
Server-side OLAP
Our OLAP controls are very powerful and can handle a large amount of data with great performance. However, some scenarios require a server-side OLAP engine to handle the processing of millions of records. The server-side OLAP engine will ship in mid-2017.
Continued Improvements
As usual we will be continuing to improve all of our controls, specifically targeting performance. We will also be continuing to fix bugs based on customer reports. I expect that we will be adding some features to FlexGrid and FlexChart based on customer requests as well.
Experimentation
While we’ll be focusing most of our efforts on shaping Wijmo 5 around our customers, we still reserve some time for fun. By fun, I mean pushing our controls to the limits of the browser. After all, Wijmo 5 was born from experimentation in ECMAScript 5.
- We’ll be trying out some emerging capabilities in browsers to see how fast we can make Wijmo.
- We will be experimenting with WebWorkers to see if we can improve application responsiveness while some control do heavy processing.
- Another area of experimentation is TypeScript. We want to try out some new features, like private members in our code base. We also want to utilize some new ECMAScript 6 feature as they become supported. Using TypeScript as our source code helps us easily do that.
We look forward to working with you in 2017!
