Facette 0.4.0alpha1 released

5 min

It’s been an awfully long time since the latest release, and we’re truly sorry for that. However here’s the good news: the first alpha release of Facette 0.4.0 is here, and there’s a lot to say about it.

“The only thing that’s changed is everything”

The reason why it’s been so long since the last version of Facette is simple. The code started to feel more and more difficult to maintain, and we’ve come to the only logical conclusion: we had to rewrite everything, from back-end to front-end. It’s been a tremendous amount of work, and so much has changed internally it was simply not possible to do it gradually from version to version.

What’s new in Facette 0.4.0

TL;DR

Front-end rewritten from scratch

The new front-end is now a single-page application (SPA) that fully relies on the back-end API to operate.

It uses AngularJS instead of hand-made JavaScript and d3.js for graph rendering, thus resolving the licensing issue with Highcharts JS library.

This redesigned front-end comes with various improvements and new features, such as:

Back-end rewritten from scratch

As for the front-end, the back-end code architecture was suffering from design issues and implementing new features was proving difficult on the long run. This new implementation benefits from those previous design mistakes and should be more future-proof.

SQL Database-backed storage (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite)

The previous versions of Facette were storing library items as flat JSON files locally on the filesystem. It turned out to be both ineffective performance-wise at scale, and limiting regarding the features we wanted to implement. As a result, we’ve opted for a natural evolution of the back-end by storing in a RDBMS not only the Facette library, but also the providers configuration.

We acknowledge this change may not be welcomed by everybody, as database systems are a potential source of operational complexity. However the good news is that besides MySQL and PostgreSQL, we also made sure to support SQLite for small and simple Facette deployments. Facette 0.4.0 comes with a new facettectl utility providing dump/restore features to back up your Facette setup easily, and switch from a RDBMS system to another seamlessly.

YAML-based configuration file format

In order to simplify the back-end configuration management, we’ve decided to switch to the well-known YAML format. Converting JSON to YAML is easy, plus you’ll finally be able to use comments in your configuration file :)

Collection templates

Graph templates – introduced in in Facette 0.3.x – allowed you to standardize graphs by creating a reference template that can be instantiated many times by specifying attributes to customize the final graph, e.g. changing the name of the source or the name of a metric. Today Facette gets even more flexible by bringing the same feature to collections: you can now create a collection template referencing graph templates (or even plain graphs if you want), and instantiate it specifying attributes such as a source name: when displaying the instantiated collection, all of its graphs will be rendered by inheriting the collection attributes.

Collection templates is an essential feature for the users using Facette in medium to large setups.

Although cosmetic, this new feature will come in handy when you exchange links to Facette graphs or collections with somebody: instead of the cryptic resource UUID in the URL it is now possible to set an alias to graphs and collections, making URLs both more user-friendly and persistent.

Variable columns collection graphs display

A new user interface mode has been implemented to display graphs in 2 or even 3 columns, very convenient to see more graphs at a glance. Also, the lateral navigation bar is now fold-able to give more room to graphs displaying – perfect for monitoring dashboards!

Support for API batch queries

To avoid round trips when multiple operations needs to be performed on the API, a new /bulk endpoint has been created. See documentation for details.

Built-in UI files

In order to simplify even more Facette deployments, we now also ship the web UI files built-in to the back-end binary.

UI localization

Starting with this release, Facette supports UI localization. In addition to English, French is now available. Contributions for more languages are welcome!

Performance improvements

This new version of Facette brings a lot of improvements at every level, especially much better to the web UI reactivity and precision in the time series rendering.

⚠️ Caution! Wet paint ⚠️

This is an alpha release of Facette: despite our best efforts and weeks of real-life testing, given the amount of internal changes we expect bugs and problems. Please test it and report any issue you might encounter at Github and we’ll do our best to fix them in order to release a stable 0.4.0 version as soon as possible.

As usual, Linux packages and various pre-compiled versions are available on Github, and the image is up-to-date on the Docker Hub.