The latest version of Apama Community Edition has arrived with a significant focus on improving the experience within the Cumulocity IoT platform. However, there are a number of improvements relevant to Apama Community Edition and I’ve highlighted many of these in this post.
Connectivity enhancements
MQTT transport. This uses a single connection rather than one per channel and has a single, configurable client ID. This allows integration with applications, such as Cumulocity IoT, which require the ability to specify the client ID.
HTTP client and server transports. now only accept requests after the EPL application has called onApplicationInitialized(). Both transports now support gzip and deflate encoding.
JSON codec. This codec now supports messages with content types specified in the message header that match a less strict pattern than had been used previously. It allows the codec to recognize JSON from more web services.
Miscellaneous
The correlator is now aware of control group (cgroup) limitations on Linux. Such limits are often observed when running as a container. The observed limits are now made available in status information via the REST and Prometheus APIs:
physicalCoresprovides the numbers of cores available to the correlator (rather than all the cores present on the machine)availableMemoryMBprovides the maximum available memory that a correlator can access
Logging is now hierarchical for all EPL, plug-ins and correlator internals which means you can easily direct all log entries to the desired log files.
A small usability enhancement to EPL means you can now write 10.rand() in addition to 10 .rand() or (10).rand() .
There have been a few notable updates to the third party libraries used by Apama:
- Java Log4J logging library is now version 2 rather than 1
- PySys system testing framework is now version 1.5 rather than 1.3
Apama Analytics Builder for Cumulocity IoT
Analytics Builder is a web-based, drag-and-drop tool for creating, managing and deploying streaming analytic models. This capability is built for the Cumulocity IoT platform. Analytics Builder is not available in Apama Community Edition, and is therefore only briefly mentioned in this release announcement.
New for Analytics Builder in this 10.5 release is additional blocks for managing alarms, events, managed objects and operations. In addition, there are improvements to the Expression and Threshold blocks as well as UI-based usability improvements. Finally, there is a comprehensive block SDK that allows developers to create, test, and package their own analytic blocks.
Apama EPL apps for Cumulocity IoT
When using Apama in the Cumulocity IoT platform developers also gain access to the new EPL apps editor and manager. This web-based editing of EPL apps is only available in Cumulocity IoT and therefore is only briefly mentioned in this post.
New in Apama 10.5 is the ability to refer to a library of EPL app samples. You can choose a complete sample or simply copy a few lines of code into your own app. Additionally, for 10.5, the Cumulocity IoT transport has been enhanced to allow you to easily make HTTP calls without repeatedly specifying authentication to the Cumulocity API and to make calls to other microservices in Cumulocity, such as Zementis predictive analytics.
Free Cumulocity IoT trial
If the Analytics Builder features mentioned in this post are of interest to you, then you can sign-up for a free trial of Cumulocity IoT and give them a go!
10.5 full commercial edition
In addition to the above new features in Apama Community Edition, the full commercial edition of Apama 10.5 includes improved integration with other Software AG products, enhanced web-based management and monitoring capabilities from Command Central, and additional support for capital markets. Please refer to the release notes for the complete set of new features in Apama 10.5.
Find out more
You can refer to the full release notes for Apama 10.5 as these contain a large number of smaller changes that I haven’t highlighted in this post.
Apama 10.5 Community Edition is available now for you to download. More information about the new capabilities mentioned here and numerous other smaller improvements are described in the release notes and product documentation available with the downloads.
The Software AG Apama team is extremely proud of this new version. Please give Apama 10.5 a try and let us know how you get on!