Happy New Year FMEers!
Here's the first What's Up Wednesday post of 2022.
What's Up Wednesday LinkedIn Newsletter
If you prefer to get your FME news on LinkedIn, What's Up Wednesday is now a regular newsletter that you can sign up to and receive notifications about. I'll still post here of course, but maybe LinkedIn is more convenient for you?
FME2022 Performance
FME2022 is still in development but should be released sometime in March, if I have my info correct. But founder Dale Lutz gave us a sneak peek at what we might expect in terms of performance.
For a spatial overlay, Dale found a 10-20% performance improvement. This sort of number is a good indication, but not the whole picture. I know of other tests that have much higher improvements. It all depends on what functionality you're using.
Regardless, this graph is what I found most interesting:
All of Dale's tests were done on a Mac and this graph shows how Intel-compiled FME worked on the new ARM M1 chip. It shows how both Windows Intel FME and Mac Intel FME work very well, which is very useful because...
2022 Trends Blog
ARM processors came up as a talking point on our blog 7 Emerging Data and Enterprise Integration Trends for 2022. Besides Mac, it's a talking point because AWS is also launching improved ARM chips. These will be available in the AWS Cloud at some point so - as the blog states - "you will see us release our server product on Graviton with FME 2022, with native Mac Apple Silicon support to follow for FME Desktop"!
Other points include the increasing amount of spatial data - including AR:
...and also topics such as agile data integration, scalability, hybrid solutions, and much more. So click here and go and read all about what to expect in 2022.
Other FME 2022 Functionality News
Back on Twitter, Dale Lutz also let slip that flatgeobuf format might be supported for 2022:
Any other formats?
Note that I don't think even Dale is guaranteeing these - at least for 2022.0 - but they are almost certainly going to be introduced at some point.
I also recently found that the EsriReprojector has gained support for vertical datums in 2022.
At the time of writing, the build you need isn't yet available, but in answer to a user on StackExchange, I made a secret video recording that you can access on YouTube here.
rTest FME Test Framework
One item that I didn't expect to see today was news about an FME test framework called rTest, released by our French partner Veremes:
I'll describe the tool by quoting from the article:
"Veremes developed in 2016 for its own needs a testing tool dedicated to FME scripts and named rTest... The version 2 of rTest which has just been released is intended for a wider audience. The product is free, Open Source and benefits from a complete documentation in English and French and a technical support from Veremes. The code has been completely rewritten and completed with a web application to consult the reports."
That web application looks like this:
I have to say that I'm wildly impressed and will be checking into this new tool as soon as I have the opportunity. Thank you Olivier and Vincent at Veremes for making this valuable tool available for us all.