Cheerio for this clear an concise article. Superb.

C ;o)

Thanks Garrett!

Thank you for answer.

Hi Vadim, to be honest we tend to just roll out vanilla Sense to our clients, as this gives the quickest time to value and the most resilient base to work from. Our clients are typically providing data to internal users, so it is far more important that the correct number is arrived at, rather than how it is displayed / navigated to. We created some very rich interfaces in QlikView, as it was simple to do out of the box. Where I think that the API bits will come into their own is when the delivery of the data is the product for a company, and how it is presented will make or break a sale.

We are keeping a very close eye on the APIs, and skilling up accordingly, but we are always about delivering exceptional value and believe that keeping things simple is the best way of achieving this at this time. We have JavaScript developers on speed-dial though…

So what is your preferred Sense environment now? Is it mashup solutions or standard Sense augmented with custom made or open source extensions? Do you have some presentations or video? It is really interesting what kind of solutions people do in Sense now.

We ourself went fully into mashup/Sense API based development. At a moment we are pretty satisfied with that approach. We have successfully ported some of our Qlik View (guided analytics) solutions to that environment, and customer’s feedback is pretty good. First video presentation based on that platform is available here: https://youtu.be/JRnvYz2rF_c (it’s in Russian but have English subtitles). We plan to make English version of videos (localization infrastructure is already in place) but we are not there yet.

Hi Cotsio,

I’m glad it is not only me who finds Sense intensely frustrating some days, it is tough to tell a client that something is not feasible when I know that it would take moments to do what they are asking in QlikView. There are many things it can do quicker and better than Sense though – the functionality around the Master Items makes this so.

The point around not being able to rely on other people’s extensions is something that I know is very much on Qlik’s mind at the moment. They are committed to promoting open source and collaborative development (this GitHub account that sprung up today further proves this), and know the issues that this presents enterprises. I think some kind of solution around this will appear at some point in the not too distant future. For now you just need to test the extensions you use, and ideally get under the bonnet of them and try and understand what is going on – in case something needs tweaking down the line.

The point about other robotics/coding kits is a very valid one, and I think it is key that we remember that the USP with the Qlik APIs is the fact it sits on top of the QIX engine and has the full associative data model behind it. This is not something you get using the JavaScript frameworks and libraries without hooking into the Qlik APIs.

Hi Ingo – thanks for your comments and for sharing the link to Martin’s presentation. I saw him present it at the London Dev Group and it was both informative and entertaining. I think there is definitely a case for moving out of the QlikView comfort zone – but fully appreciate why people find it hard to let go of a very good thing.

One issue that still stands out for me, while continuing the Lego Mindstorm analogy:
you cannot rely 100% on some free extensions available nowadays in Branch (even though some are great ideas and some are pretty decent developments), while Qlik doesn’t create yet a true marketplace, where you could have some reliability and consistency expectation.

Other ideas:
PRO: beware: you cold do more with Mindstorm, if loosing the Lego Interface and using other development tools. Same on Sense (as Steve also underlined…)
AGAINST: Mindstorm is not the coolest, strongest, easiest or best robotics kit for learning and DYI projects. But has the chance to have Lego behind.
If Simplicity is at the core of Qlik values, I would like to quote Constantin Brancusi, a famous Romanian sculptor: “Simplicty is a solved complexity”. Starting from here,… it would have been better that Qlik Sense had already, out of the box, most Qlikview options, plus the expandability.
There are so many small things that still frustrates me in Sense, in terms of missing shortcuts, interface consistency, options and functionalities that requires workarounds, extra work, etc

But it’s true that I am, every day, convincing me to like more and more Sense. ;-)