Dex is a new software project that I am very excited about. It is called Data Explorer, or Dex for short.
Dex aims to bring sophisticated visualization capabilities without requiring a high degree of expertise in order to get professional results. The official site for Dex can be found here.
Dex In A Nutshell
Dex provides a rich set of components, or task, for acquiring, transforming, and visualizing data. From the GUI, these task can be arranged into a workflow to solve simple to complex task. These arrangements can be saved as projects and stored on disk.
The Dex Palette
When Dex starts, it will appear something like the following:
- Dex On Startup
Dex contains a wide variety of task in it’s palette which fall into general categories such as:
- Datasource – Task for acquiring data.
- Table Manipulation – Task for manipulating table data.
- Charting – Task for basic charting such as Line, Area, Bubble, Scatter, Bar and Bubble charts.
- Programming – Task for writing Groovy programs to do all sorts of things.
- Database – Task for interacting with databases.
- Utilities – Task to accomplish various things.
- Visualization – A large number of task for visualizing data.
General Usage
I have used Dex for a number of diverse task at home and at work. These have included:
- Java VM memory analysis using jstat as input.
- Creating what-if business scenarios based upon excel and database input.
- Creating statistical models for biometric security models.
- Creating pretty pictures for Powerpoint presentations.
- Exploring complex data relationships.
- Gathering log file data remotely, filtering it, and charting the information to solve various production issues.
Introduce Yourself
If you are using Dex, I would love to hear what you are doing with it. It might even make the blog 🙂 Feedback is always welcome!
I can be contacted directly at: patrick145@msn.com
Best of luck!
– Pat
Dex 