Announcing GoodData’s new Platform Trial and Tutorials

At GoodData we’ve long had this running debate: do we follow the industry trend and make our demos and tutorials look ‘simple’ and ‘easy’ for business buyers? Or do we show analytics developers our ‘secret sauce’? Should we show how our biggest customers really create mission-critical applications with embedded analytics using code and APIs and our robust semantic layer? After all, GoodData is the leading analytics platform for embedded, white-labeled and OEM analytics.

I’m personally happy to report that for now, the developers have won!

We’re excited to announce two new additions to the developer portal this month:

• A Platform trial that provides full access to GoodData for 30 days.
• A series of hands-on tutorials that are meaty, deep and relevant for developers who want to create real analytic applications.

Let’s talk about the trial first.

We are introducing a developer experience that opens up full access to the GoodData platform. The trial experience includes the APIs, data pipeline, data warehouse, life cycle management, data distribution, up to 10 analytic workspaces, our insight discovery and visualization tool, along with GoodData.UI, the Javascript-React developer library that is part of our Spectrum UI.

The trial will be open to you for a minimum of 30 days, and as long as you are active and engaged, it can be extended to allow you to finish the tutorials.

What about those tutorials?

We are also releasing the first in a series of developer tutorials that will cover the range of GoodData’s technical capabilities. Starting at the beginning of the data pipeline, you’ll leverage GoodData’s APIs and actual code to programmatically set up an analytics semantic layer and inject data directly into a workspace. Continuing on, we will provide you with deep experiences around:

• MAQL — Our Multidimensional Analytical Query Language, that leverages the data model to provide an expressive and concise abstraction over base data.
• The power of our comprehensive data handling and data management APIs and language bindings.
• Metrics — created in MAQL, that are used to set up an ideal environment for business end-users to explore data and create their own visualizations and insights.
• Analytical Designer, an easy-to-use query and visualization tool that can be used to tailor visualizations that you have embedded in your application, or even embedded whole as a value-added feature.

In later tutorials, we’ll cover the data pipeline including connecting to cloud data warehouse providers, data distribution, and building analytic applications using our React component library.

To get started, head over to GoodData’s Platform trial page. Note that one registration will set you up for both the Embedded analytics trial, which lets you explore a demo application build with GoodData.UI, and the Platform trial, which is what you’ll need for the tutorials and to set up your own projects.

Please let us know what you think of our new Platform trial, and what you would like to see in future tutorials, demos or videos.