gdotv 2.1.2 Release Showcase

Today I’m very proud to announce the release, at long last, of gdotv 2.1.2. This is our most important update yet, and is full of essential improvements and changes to take our software to the next level.

Major version change and major performance improvements

The first thing you’ll notice is that we’re going from 1.70.92 to 2.1.2, which looks like a big leap (and it is). However there are no breaking change as part of this release – our compatibility remains the same as ever!

The main reason behind the shift from version 1.x to version 2.x is a major upgrade of the technology stack that gdotv runs on. When we first started developing gdotv, it was running on a Vue 2 + Vuetify 2 + Webpack stack which was just about to give way to a newer, better Vue 3 + Vuetify 3 + Vite stack. For a number of technical reasons over the years we’ve been unable to perform that upgrade, up until recently, which leads us to today.

The upgrade work itself was quite significant both in scope and reward. One of the most immediately noticeable improvement in gdotv 2.x is performance: thanks to the benefits of the Vue 3/Vite ecosystem, gdotv now runs much faster overall.

The performance improvements we’re seeing today aren’t the result of a deep dive into our application’s optimization either – and so we will continue delivering faster, more resource efficient versions of gdotv throughout the year.

While the bulk of the work we’ve done on this release is behind the scenes, we also have a number of new features and user experience improvements to show for it.

User Experience Improvements

First and foremost, if you’ve been using gdotv on a macOS or Linux based device, you’ll have likely found the auto update experience clunky at best. We have finally resolved this issue and all users across all operating systems will now receive the same one-click auto update experience, which we’re hoping will help you adopt newer (and as always, better) versions of gdotv more easily.

We’ve also reworked the layout and resizing features of the application, and while this may not be immediately visible to the eye, resizing of the Gremlin Query Assistant or Query Output is now much faster and much better looking.

Finally, we’ve improved the handling of presenting Query results such that when running consecutive queries, the Query Output will now automatically update itself without closing then re-opening, as shown below:

Exposing gdotv Playgrounds over localhost

When we sunset our free gdotv Basic tier in favor of gdotv Lite, one valid concern that our user base expressed was losing the ability to use gdotv for local development against a Gremlin Server, for instance.

To respond to those concerns, we’ve now made our in-memory graph, gdotv Playground, optionally available to connect to a configured port on localhost. Currently this feature is limited to wrapping gdotv Playground with a Gremlin Server, though we will be investigating other embedded server technologies, such as JanusGraph.

This means that from this release, you can use gdotv to quickly stand up and manage Gremlin Servers as well as query them directly from your development environment, for instance.

What’s next for gdotv?

Parallel to this 2.0 rewrite, we’ve been busy planning for our upcoming work for the year. Last year, we’d commissioned a number of improvements to SigmaJS, the WebGL based graph visualization framework that you’ll recognize as the “Graph (Advanced)” view in the Query Output, as well as our Graph Data Explorer. SigmaJS is a high-performance, open source library developed by OuestWare, a fantastic data analysis solutions company responsible for plenty open source gems built around SigmaJS, and many more.

The 3.0 release of SigmaJS is coming soon and will be integrated in gdotv in the near future. This release focuses on performance improvements allowing rendering of more complex graphs, as well as a few cosmetic improvements such as the availability of curved edges, at long last!