June Developer Platform updates

Each month, our Developer Program delights its members by showcasing the latest projects from our internal developer platform and tools engineers. In June, we highlighted updates from the Hyper API teams and showcased a few solutions that our developer community entered in the latest Dev Site Mini Challenges. Let’s dive into what we showed.

The Hyper API team releases new updates every month. In this month’s release, we added several SQL functions to process spatial data with the Hyper API. These functions allow you to:

• Create geography objects. For instance, the function geo_make_point creates a point with latitude and longitude coordinates.
• Perform calculations on geography objects, for example, geo_distance returns the distance between two points.
• Manipulate the vertex order of polygons in geography objects. These functions can be used to address problems with spatial joins or auto-zoom where data comes from a source that uses a different winding order for polygons than the one used by Tableau.

Additionally, prepared queries gained support for parallelized execution; PREPARE prepares a statement for execution and EXECUTE then executes the prepared statement. We also fixed a few bugs raised by the community. You can find more information on the Hyper API new release page.

Last month, we announced that Hyper API samples were now available on GitHub. In June, we released a new type of sample: community-supported samples. These new samples are more use case-specific but are still written and reviewed by the Hyper team.

Currently, the three samples available cover how to create a multi-table .hyper file and publish it on Tableau, and how to create a .hyper from a wildcard union on text files held in an AWS S3 bucket. You can find these samples on GitHub.

In April, we launched this year’s DataDev Site Challenges—a way to challenge the innovation, skill, and imagination of our developer community. We published 18 fun challenges in total, ran 6 workshops on the Tableau Developer Platform and various developer tools, and had 12 DataDevs present their solutions during spotlight developer how-to's. For some participants, it was an occasion to learn new skills and get hands-on with new APIs. For others, the challenges were a way to show off their honed skillsets. We had members write their first extension using the JavaScript API to embed a viz or create a Webhook using Postman. Participants got exclusive DataDev swag – and a few bragging rights.

Curious about what participants thought of the challenges? Check out some of their thoughts on the experience:

• Zak Geis summarized his participation in a blog post.
• Anya Prosvetova wrote two blog posts explaining how she solved the challenges: Writing Tableau Extensions and Automating Tableau with the REST API.
• Timothy Vermeiren shared in a blog post his experience with the Metadata API.
• Andre de Vries chose another format and published a video going over his solution for Webhooks Level 3.

You can see the final list of challenges on our website. Additionally, all the webinars covering the solutions can be found on our YouTube channel.

Real customer use cases inspired all the challenges—why not try some on your own time and get ready for the next DataDev Mini Challenge season!

Join the #DataDev community to get your invitation to our exclusive Sprint Demos and be the first to know about the Developer Platform updates—directly from the engineering team. See you next month!