The best new feature in FME 2014

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Christina Maslen

So here we are in January again, post Christmas blues, New Year resolutions already broken and discarded, and it’s the month Safe Software release a new version of their spatial ETL software FME. Beta versions are available throughout the year for you to try but January marks the month when you can try out their latest and greatest. Both the Desktop and Server versions have been updated to version 2014.

Part of Safe Software’s mantra is to make each new release of FME faster and better than the last, and this year is no exception. It comes with exciting new additions to the familiar well used transformers plus new transformers to take the pain out working with data, not to mention the array of new formats that are now supported.

The best new feature to me though is the FME application itself. It has been re-written from scratch. We aren’t talking about the whole application, not the application that does the complicated data translation and transformation, but the application you use to create your workflows (workspaces). Why is this exciting? Well it’s been re-written from the ground up using a different technology so you can create your workspaces not only on Windows but on Linux and OSX too. Previously you could run your workspaces on Linux (this is what we recommend all production FME Server installations to use). They had to be run from the command line though and the graphical user interface wasn’t present but now it is. So if you prefer Linux or OSX to Windows (and who doesn’t!?!) then you can now create your FME workspaces using those operating systems.

Another major update is the application to view data (Universal Viewer). This has now been superseded by the Data Inspector, again re-written from scratch to be much more useful. The Data Inspector map view has been supplemented with a tabular view of the attribute data, making it much easier to navigate and interrogate data. The map view itself has also been updated so it can display 3D data.

Well done Safe Software on another great update to FME.

Written by Steve Davies, Senior Software Engineer at Dotted Eyes