Progress launches MarkLogic FastTrack to accelerate app development

Progress, a provider of AI-powered infrastructure software, has announced the release of Progress MarkLogic FastTrack, a new UI toolkit designed to significantly speed up the development of data-driven applications.

According to the company, MarkLogic FastTrack enables organisations to build such applications up to 90% faster than if they were starting from scratch.

The toolkit aims to address the challenges organisations face as they incorporate more diverse data types to provide context for business analytics. As noted by Stewart Bond, Vice-President of Data Integration and Data Intelligence Software Research at IDC, “Data is distributed, diverse, and dynamic - constantly changing. Organisations that make consolidation and monitoring of data in real-time a high priority, and invest in enabling technology, have a greater opportunity for competitive advantage.”

MarkLogic FastTrack is intended to help data users, analysts, and decision-makers better explore complex data stored in the MarkLogic platform. This exploration comes through interactive, user-friendly, and visually rich interfaces. The toolkit's ready-to-use components enable development teams to assemble functional applications more efficiently, potentially shortening the time needed to obtain actionable business insights.

John Ainsworth, EVP and General Manager of Application and Data Platform at Progress, emphasised the benefits of this new release. He stated, “A composable, component-based approach to app building favours greater agility, improved developer productivity, and faster time to insight, all of which are critical in today’s highly complex, fast-paced business environment. With the launch of MarkLogic FastTrack, users can leverage one powerful tool to visualise data in context that will make a true impact on their business.”

Progress has integrated several features and functionalities into MarkLogic FastTrack, leveraging its existing KendoReact UI library. These include customisable UI components for better meeting business requirements, as well as custom search facets and dynamic filters to allow end-users to navigate and explore extensive datasets. A range of visualisation techniques is also included, such as geospatial maps, timelines, network graphs, charts, and text components, all designed to help users discover various dimensions of their data and make more informed decisions.

Bond explained the market needs driving the adoption of these capabilities, stating, "It’s no longer a matter of choice—organisations must tap into the power of unstructured data to manage, predict, and prepare for the future."

Another core element of MarkLogic FastTrack is its data access layer, which simplifies application development and data access through pre-built integration with MarkLogic Server, eliminating the need for extensive ETL or API design. This aspect facilitates the creation of interfaces that can present relationships between different types of data - geospatial, temporal, and graphical - in one unified interface.

MarkLogic FastTrack also provides extensive features for data citizens and decision-makers. It enables them to search, explore, and analyse various dimensions of corporate data, whether private, public, or open source intelligence (OSINT), in an interactive and visually cohesive manner. For instance, analysts can perform exploratory geo-temporal analysis to assess how data distribution changes over time and at different locations, which could prove useful in fields such as epidemiology.

The toolkit also comes with sample applications to help developers get started quickly on common scenarios. It promises to help users trace back events, investigate and prevent fraud, monitor critical information, and manage physical inventory, among other capabilities.