This guest
Saic Anji Jaga Gamma Team: Composed of the core members of Anji Jaga Gamma Innovation Studio, the founding team of AJ-Report, the open source BI platform, as well as THE founding team of AJ-CAPTCHA and AJ-APPSP.
Aj-report: AJ-Report is an open source BI platform by Anji. It supports multiple data sources, built-in MySQL, ElasticSearch and Kudu drivers, and supports custom data sets without data interface development and 17 big-screen components.
Industry demand creates open source opportunities
Many developers are familiar with your project, but they may not be familiar with your team. Could you first introduce your team? How many people are there now?
Saic Anji Jiaga Gamma Team: The SAIC Anji Jiaga Gamma team is composed of the core members of the Anji Jiaga Gamma Innovation Studio, which is also the 2020 SAIC Employee (model worker) innovation studio. Gamma Innovation Studio focuses on the improvement of software research and development efficiency, and orderly pushes forward the innovation work from three aspects of “integration of unified platform, reuse degree construction and work standard innovation”, and has made remarkable achievements. The core members of the team are as follows:
Lee De (project founder) : Team shepherd, RHCE and full stack developer, open source project founder.
Wang Bin (Architect) : System architect, system analyst, full stack engineer, open source enthusiast.
Qian Lishi (Development) : Big front-end engineer, AUTHOR of AJ-Report and one of the main contributors to AJ-CAPTCHA.
Deming Rao (Development) : Java engineer, author of AJ-CAPTCHA and one of the major contributors to AJ-Report.
Qian Ming (Development) : A big data development engineer born in 1995. Currently, he is mainly responsible for requirements collection, document compilation, chart development and other related work in AJ-Report.
Aj-report has gained more than 2000 stars in less than two months. What do you think are the reasons?
Qian Ming: The subjective reason is that our team has been deeply engaged in the field of big data analysis, and has done many large screen projects, so we have a relatively good understanding of customer needs, development pain points and industry status quo. Aj-report grew out of our internal “Magic Mirror” project, which was designed to enable people with less development experience to do large screen design. Our design idea is to complete the large screen design in three steps (matching data source – > matching data set – > designing large screen). Finally, the configuration process is clear, easy to operate, and what you see is what you get.
Qian Lishi: Objective reason is industry demand is big, have similar needs of users, industry or less free and easy to use open source project, some experience accumulated by our contribution, on the one hand, a lower development costs with similar needs the enterprise, including time cost, manpower cost, etc., on the other hand, through the broad participation of community, enrich our product business form, Achieve mutual benefit and win-win results through open source sharing.
Why do you choose to work on open source projects in BI (Business intelligence)? What factors were considered before doing it?
Wang Bin: It is also a coincidence that I choose BI. Because our company is mainly engaged in the informatization of logistics, there are many statistical analysis scenarios in all aspects of logistics, and various statistical indicators are often changeable, so the traditional development method can not quickly respond to the changes in demand.
In 2018, under the leadership of CTO Nie Jinzhen, we initiated the research and development of magic Mirror, a data analysis product, and initially realized the whole process of data collection, data cleaning and data visualization with low code. From 2019 to 2020, we found that the demand for in-depth customization in reports was increasing, and the visualization of magic mirror could no longer meet the needs of business in terms of UI aesthetics and interaction. In 2021, we separated the visualization module and reconstructed it to form the current AJ-Report.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of AJ-Report compared with the more mature BI software in the market?
Rao Deming: With the development of enterprise informatization, the domestic reporting market is very large at present, and the difference of reporting demand is also very obvious.
In the first type of scenario, for example, in enterprise operation, there are high requirements for self-help analysis reports, data drilling and associated operations are often used, and general commercial BI is mature and fully supported.
The second scenario is the real-time production monitoring statistics on the assembly line in the production enterprise. There is basically no user interaction in this type of report, but the demand for large screen is large. Aj-report is currently more focused on providing low-cost, efficient solutions for the second category of scenarios.
Advantage:
- Sustainability: We will continue to follow the suggestions of the community, invest resources to improve and enrich;
- Flexibility: the underlying architecture is designed flexibly and easy to operate;
- Scalability: Data sources, data sets and report components are easy to expand, supporting data sources such as pan-SQL and Http, and the overall architecture design is easy to expand. We have always been open source and free to use, and will continue to improve AJ-Report with the help of the community.
Disadvantages: Compared with most commercial BI in the market, AJ-Report still needs to grow in chart types, visual templates, etc. After all, open source is not a long time, more business scenario support and more chart library materials are needed, which needs to be improved by the power of the open source community, and we welcome the active participation of community contributors.
Do you plan to do some commercial exploration with THE help of AJ-Report?
Wang Bin: At present, we are focusing on making aj-Report easier to use and richer to expand more chart components. Aj-report will remain open source. About the future commercialization, may try to Report the surrounding, such as providing a draft design for different industries domestic share platform, let more community of users can submit their best screen layouts, let users lack of UI design experience, can be directly online download, import the local use, allow the user to focus to the processing of data itself, Reduce the production difficulty of high beautiful large screen.
What are the future plans of the team in AJ-Report? Will there be more open source projects?
Li De: Aj-Report’s future plans mainly focus on the iterative upgrade of ease of operation and component richness. Meanwhile, it considers to provide a platform for sharing large-screen design drafts for different industries, so that more community users can participate in it.
As for whether we will launch more open source projects, “user-centered, cooperation and sharing, professional innovation, integrity and responsibility” are our common values, and we will spare no effort on the road of innovation and sharing. Open source can enable us to absorb more excellent design ideas, improve our products, and better feedback to the community, for the development of domestic open source cause make a modest contribution. We firmly believe that there will be more and more excellent open source projects in China, and of course we will actively participate in them. There are still some products we are thinking about, but they are not perfect yet. I believe we can share them with you soon.
I don’t need anything in return, but I need a promise from you
From behavior Verification code (AJ-CAPTCHA) to App Version Management Solution (AJ-APPSP) to AJ-Report, the team’s several open source projects have been well received. So how do you decide if a project is worth the effort?
Read: We mainly look at two things: first, is there a wide range of business scenario requirements to support, and second, is there an open source easy-to-use solution in the industry?
Take AJ-CaptCHA as an example. In 2019, our company developed at least 20 or 30 new apps every year, and each App basically used traditional image verification codes, bringing poor user experience. At that time, most customers wanted to use behavioral captcha, but did not want to increase the budget to buy commercial captcha. Under the influence of both customer demands and budget, we came up with the idea of self-research. In the internal customer wide praise and CTO Nie Jinzhen’s strong support, we successfully open source. Aj-appsp and AJ-Report have similar scenarios.
What is your ideal of a quality open source community?
Li De: We have not been doing open source for a long time. In my personal understanding, a good open source community should have several key labels: goodwill, tolerance, appreciation, contribution and cherish. Let me tell you a story.
, there is a called “this sentence passed on to the next is to help people in the story, the content is a young man named crace, roughly in a wintry night because car” anchor “trapped in the suburbs, a man after the ride, with the horse helped crace without saying anything to pull the car into the town, when the grateful crace to his reward money, The man said, “I don’t need anything in return, but I want you to give me a promise that when others are in trouble, you will try your best to help them.” In the years that followed, Kress volunteered to help many more people, repeating the same quote each time. One day, many years later, Crixus was stranded on an isolated island by a sudden flood. A brave boy risked being swallowed by the flood to save him. When he thanked the boy, the boy also said the words Kress had said countless times: “There is no need for return, but I want you to give me a promise…” .
The story of help delivery is similar to open source. In some ways, it fits with our team culture — “If you’re lucky enough to meet someone, you don’t know them” — and we’re working hard to pass it on in our community.
Rao deming: My ideal open source community is made up of people who share the same interests.
1. Infrastructure. Good technology and frameworks that can quickly leverage the community to improve development efficiency and quality;
Second, development scenario. In the actual development process, different companies and developers have different needs, capabilities, and environments, which requires open source software to be flexible enough to meet different scenarios;
Three, commercial value. Realize the service value of developers and open source software, and create the commercialization of free community. Only when an application can be used more and more with the development of the platform, so as to reap the commercial value, can the community move towards the positive cycle of attracting global creative and innovative talents.
Simply put, a community with a clear purpose will attract the right people to do the right things together, and value communication and collaboration. And all of this depends on the community and individual autonomy, enterprise and room for improvement.
What qualities do you think a team should have to make a good open source project?
Chris Tsien: First of all, individuals should be interested and willing to do a good job. Open source is something that requires a lot of rest time. The healthy development of the project requires the continuous investment of team members.
Secondly, we should have the mentality of openness, learning and improvement, and dare to think and do. Excellent projects must be able to solve the pain points of some industries, and the project target positioning should be clear. We can start to accumulate experience by designing small but beautiful projects.
What would you like to share with developers who “have an idea about open source but don’t know how to act on it”?
Qian Ming: Just do it.
Wang Bin: Participate in open source projects, including contributing documents, submitting issues, adding test cases, submitting PR, source code analysis and dissemination, etc., in many ways. It is also helpful to analyze excellent open source projects and learn their design ideas to improve technical level and broaden technical horizon. Find the open source project that you are interested in, deeply understand the source level, digest and absorb, integrate and improve, if you can give effective optimization and improvement suggestions and be adopted, I believe it is beneficial to yourself and the project positive cycle.
What are some of the most rewarding moments of working on open source projects?
Saic Anji Jaga Gama team: The first one was the moment when we won the AJ-CaptCHA GVP Trophy. The second one was the launch of AJ-Report this year, which gained wide attention from the community in less than two months. We’re really happy to help a lot of other developers with similar needs.
What is the pace of project development?
Saic Anji Jia Jia Gamma team: We work flexibly and pay attention to work efficiency. Our working time is basically to solve the problems of business system development. Aj-report is open source and can only be done in your spare time. The design and development phase was the most intense for us, sometimes working late into the night without fatigue, because we felt it was worthwhile to do something. At present, the expected planning has been preliminarily completed, and now it is in the optimization stage, with the development intensity and pace approaching normal.
What was the biggest difficulty during the development of the project? How did the team solve it?
Saic Anji Jia Jia Gamma Team: In the development process of AJ-Report, the biggest difficulty is how to solve the conflict between the richness of components and the difference of component functions. The operation attributes of each component are different, but the configuration of style, data and other aspects is ultimately the configuration. How to decouple these configurations in the designer is the biggest difficulty in planning this product. After analyzing numerous commercial and open source BI and brainstorming with the team, we finally abstracted our three steps (provisioning data source — > provisioning data set — > designing large screen).
What are the ways for teams to relieve stress under high intensity work?
Afternoon tea and group Tours.
Finally, I’ll allow you to advertise for yourself.
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