Top technologies & tech stacks used with Flexmonster

The power of Flexmonster is that you can integrate it with the majority of the technical stacks. Since the component works on the client side of your app, it doesn’t rely on server-side technologies used within a project. That's why, you're free to pick up your favorite programming language, data store, and front-end framework, and start creating your outstanding analytics app empowered with an interactive web pivot table and pivot charts.

Having collected a lot of feedback on integration, we’ve decided to make an overview of top tech stacks choices our clients make.

Curious about technologies and data stores Flexmonster with which integrates so smoothly?

Let’s go ahead and check them out together!

Front-end technologies to use Flexmonster with

Given that our component is completely client-side, it feels logical to start by outlining the most popular front-end technologies used together with Flexmonster. 

React 

Being ahead of all the modern web frameworks, including Vue and Angular, no wonder React is favored by plenty of our clients. 

React is a JavaScript library for building rich-featured client interfaces. On top of being backed by Facebook, it steadily reaps the benefits from open-source contributions. 

We at Flexmonster consider React a reasonable and time-tested choice for both startups and enterprises due to the number of reasons, namely:

• Fast rendering. Owing to the Virtual DOM, React is broadly used for high-load applications.
• High level of flexibility towards the architecture and independence on the rest of the technology stack.
• Components reuse.
• Unidirectional data flow which ensures the code's stability and app's performance. 
• A vibrant ecosystem and SEO-friendliness. 

Angular

Angular is a TypeScript-based front-end framework. As well as React, it’s open-source, but the lion’s share of its development contributions belongs to Google. 

Our clients acknowledge this framework as a great front-end solution for cloud-native apps. On top of that, developers often benefit from the simultaneous development of both desktop and mobile versions of the app. 

Here's the list of top reasons to choose Angular:

• Bidirectional data binding that allows reducing development time by eliminating the need to write extra code to sync data from the UI (View) with JavaScript objects (Model).
• Directives. Developers can extend HTML's syntax and create rich app's components.
• Dependency injection that makes components reusable and easy to manage.
• Active community that provides lots of content and tools.

After React, Angular is the second most popular framework among our clients. Thus, we made the integration process fairly seamless.

Vue

Vue.js is another excellent framework for building interactive user interfaces. It was released in 2014 by Evan You, who was driven by the idea to create a new framework with the best features of Angular and React embodied in it.

Vue.js is often called a progressive framework. Why progressive? Simply because it's designed to be 'increasingly adaptable' - easy to use and integrate with other frameworks and libraries. It's also commonly called approachable, which means if you know HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, you can pick Vue up fast.

Here are our customers’ top reasons to use Vue for web app development: 

• Simple enough to start with.
• Runtime performance.
• Comprehensive documentation covering all the framework's essentials.
• Easy to optimize.
• Smooth configuration.

Having noticed the rapid growth of its popularity, we put our efforts into delivering an easy-to-use Vue wrapper for Flexmonster, which you can already test on our GitHub. 

With Vue, you can embrace the component-driven approach and build an app beamingly fast. With Flexmonster, you can enjoy the data visualization that tells a story right inside your Vue app. 

Now let's move on to data stores that our customers prefer to use. 

Databases, search engines, and data warehouses

We at Flexmonster are doing our utmost to make communication between your data and our component as simple as possible. 

That’s why our clients can take advantage of a wide variety of supported data sources and build well-organized reports based on their data.

We have ready-to-use connectors for MongoDB, Elasticsearch, OLAP storages (SSAS and Mondrian).

But most importantly, starting from version 2.8, we provide an ability to connect to any kind of data store via the custom data source API - a communication protocol for configuring the data interchange process between Flexmonster Pivot Table and your data layer. Its main advantage is that you can implement server-side data processing and send pre-aggregated data to the client side of your application. With this innovative approach, you can visualize data that comes from any data source.

MySQL

Deservedly, MySQL receives the top rating. It's the number one choice among our clients when it comes to picking relational database management systems. 

And not without reason. MySQL is compatible with myriads of programming interfaces and backends due to its client-server architecture. You can run it on all major operating systems: UNIX-based, Linux distributions, Windows, or macOS.

It's widely used for building fast and secure data storage systems as well as simple web apps. 

Oracle

Developed and released in 1977, over the last 43 years, it became one of the most trustworthy database engines and a keystone of data management. Designed to tackle large-scale deployments, it’s favored mostly for its performance-related features. 

Wondering which database to choose - Oracle or MySQL? Feel free to deep dive into a detailed comparison we made in our blog.

Elasticsearch

The popularity of this open-source search engine has been exponentially increasing in recent years. It's used by such high-loaded web apps as Stack Overflow, Netflix, Medium, GitHub, and Medium. 

And we are trying to keep up with the pace of Elasticsearch development. 

Using Elasticsearch and Flexmonster, our users can experience powerful aggregation capabilities of the former and speed of displaying data by the latter. 

MongoDB

MongoDB is an open-source, NoSQL database favored for its fast and flexible access to the data. Organized in an object-oriented manner, it stores the app's data as documents. 

Here are top features database administrators and developers love MongoDB for:

• Fast horizontal scalability via sharding. It's easy to expand the resources of the database on demand. 
• Easy to set up.
• Dynamic schema.
• Unaffected by SQL injection.
• Supports indexing of documents.
• Stores JSON-like documents in collections that make data persistence easy.

Luckily, there's no need to write complex queries to retrieve the data for visualization  - Flexmonster does all the hard work for you. Install the MongoDB connector and start building insightful reports based on the MongoDB data.

Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS) is the most actively used OLAP solution among our clients and a true leader on the market. 

And there's a good reason for that. This technology developed by Microsoft is favored for the flexibility of data model creation and management as well as for powerful features for multi-dimensional analysis. 

Together, Flexmonster and SSAS make a winning combination that considerably facilitates data analysis. On top of that, Flexmonster supports two types of data storage models - multi-dimensional (MOLAP) and tabular (ROLAP).

Microsoft's Azure Analysis Services

Another popular option among our clients. Microsoft's Azure Analysis Services offers enterprise features for modeling data in the cloud. 

Known for accelerated processing of queries over massive datasets, it simplifies navigation through huge volumes of data.

BigQuery 

It's a highly scalable cloud data warehouse that provides an in-memory Business Intelligence Engine developed by Google. It assists in revealing insights about your data, allowing to forget about infrastructure management. 

The best way to work with BigQuery is to configure data processing and sending aggregated results to Flexmonster via the custom data source API.

Amazon Redshift

This is a cloud-based data warehouse product designed for large scale data set storage and analysis. 

If you're searching for a business intelligence tool for Amazon Redshift, Flexmonster is a nice option to try. Using the custom API approach, it's also feasible to start pivoting data from Redshift.

PostgreSQL

Another open-source database that is known for its high performance and multitasking. As well as MySQL and Oracle, it uses SQL as its main query language.

Its key features are:

• ACID compliance.
• Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) support.
• Runs on the majority of operating systems.
• Supports stored procedures.
• Can be used with any programming language, e.g., Java, C, C++.
• Supports both primitive data types and user-defined ones.
• Large community.

MariaDB

MariaDB has the same database structure as MySQL since it's a fork of MySQL that extends the features of the latter. 

Namely, it offers more options for storage engines, improvements in speed, faster cache, and indexes, larger connection pool, improved replication, new extensions, and more. 

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So, here we came to the main question: "What are the most popular combinations of the above-mentioned frameworks and data stores among Flexmonster’s users?"

This question brings us to the definition of a tech stack itself. A tech stack is a foundation of every web application. It consists of front-end frameworks, server-side programming languages, data stores, and other tools for web development.

Rather than going deep into the details of tech stacks commonly used with Flexmonster, we'll briefly outline the key features that make them so favorable.

Tech stacks to use Flexmonster with

MEAN

MEAN stands for MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, and Node.js. It's a collection of JavaScript-based technologies used for building complex web apps.

With Node.JS as a server and Express as a node application framework, it's easy to create an MVC application. As for Angular, it greatly simplifies building single-page apps (SPAs). 

Developers often call it an end-to-end JavaScript, which means a single language is used throughout the full web development cycle.

Its main strengths are:

• All products are open-source and backed by a lively community.
• Supports MVC architecture.
• Comes with a powerful set of tools for testing.
• Independent on the operating system (unlike the LAMP stack).

An alternative to MEAN is called the MERN stack, with Angular being replaced by React. 

LAMP

One of the industry standards among the technology stacks. The LAMP stack consists of four layers that support one another, namely Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. 

Linux is an operating system and the foundation of the stack. Apache is a web server software that works on top of Linux. MySQL, as previously said, is a database that stores the app's data. Instead of MySQL, PostgreSQL is often used as a part of a solution. PHP is a programming language that makes up the final layer. 

And here we are not far behind as well. 

To prepare a LAMP-based app with built-in analytics, you can implement the logic of data processing via the custom data source API.

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This time we talked about the most popular technologies our clients use in their web development and successfully integrate Flexmonster with them. 

If you feel we didn't cover some technology or a combination of those important to you, or you'd like to learn more about Flexmonster integration capabilities, please share with us which tech stack you're using, and we'll give you our best recommendations on integration.

Useful guides⭐

Integration with frameworks

• Pivot Table for React
• Pivot Table for React Native
• Pivot Table for Angular
• Pivot Table for Vue
• Pivot Table for Django
• Pivot Table for R Shiny

Connecting to data sources

• Pivot Table for Elasticsearch
• Pivot Table for MongoDB
• Pivot Table for Microsoft Analysis Services (SSAS)
• Pivot Table for Pentaho Mondrian

Connecting to data sources via the custom data source API

• Introduction to the custom data source API
• Connecting to an Oracle database
• Connecting to a MySQL database
• Connecting to a Microsoft SQL Server database
• Connecting to a PostgreSQL database
• Node.JS server sample for processing JSON data
• .NET server sample for processing JSON & CSV data