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Home - Announcements / All posts - Radian ® Studio Beta / Release 9 Outlook
Mike Fisher

899 post(s)
#24-Dec-15 11:15

This announcement provides details on how to apply for participation in the beta test program for Manifold's new Radian ® Studio product. In addition it provides outlook for Manifold products to be released in 2016, including Manifold System Release 9.

The Radian Engine

Manifold's Radian engine is a new generation DBMS and GIS engine that is the foundation for all new generation Manifold products, including Radian Studio and Manifold System Release 9. The Radian engine is technology originally developed for OEMs. Today that technology powers new Manifold retail products.

Radian Innovations:

Dramatic speed and capacity increases - Radian can easily handle GIS and DBMS projects in the tens of gigabytes range on the professional desktop. It has been designed for routine, comfortable work with projects in the hundreds of gigabyte range. Radian instantly opens and saves projects of almost any size. Radian easily works with huge raster images and with vector drawings containing millions of objects.

Parallel Performance - Radian is highly parallelized. The engine automatically utilizes multiple CPUs, multiple CPU cores and multiple GPUs. It will automatically utilize massive parallelism with many thousands of GPU cores for hundreds of functions. Parallelism provides better user interfaces, faster routine tasks and unmatched analytic performance.

Parallel SQL - Radian exposes virtually all capabilities through fully parallel SQL. Virtually all aspects of data sets in use, massively parallel analytics, Radian infrastructure and other operations are accessible through SQL. Radian allows SQL to be executed locally or on other DBMS servers or in a combination of local and remotely executed SQL within the same query. Radian offloads many operations to GPGPU for unmatched, massively parallel performance.

Any data format, any data source - Radian can connect to and be a full-power partner and front end to any industry standard DBMS. Radian can read a vast range of GIS file formats and can write some of the most common formats directly without having to do import and export. Radian can work with data supplied over the web using OpenGIS and other protocols. All that data can be freely combined for analysis or presentation.

Fully programmable - The Radian engine provides a great development platform for building applications. The object model and SQL allow accessing and controlling all aspects of the system. The object model can be accessed from any .NET or COM client. There is built-in support for many of the popular programming languages, a built-in Javascript engine, support for addons, REPL consoles for dynamic languages, and other tools.

Internationalization - The Radian engine and products built on it by Manifold enable easy localization, by VARs or by users. The engine has been designed from the start to support working with text data in languages other than English.

Manifold Products using Radian

Manifold will introduce a range of retail products powered by the Radian engine. The first two such products will be Radian Studio, for both GIS and non-GIS users, and Manifold System Release 9, a dedicated GIS product. These products serve an evolving market in which general purpose DBMS and other non-GIS applications have high demand for Radian capabilities in addition to GIS demands for Radian.

Manifold is introducing Radian Studio in addition to and ahead of Manifold System Release 9 for three reasons:

1. Non-GIS users are not well-served by a dedicated GIS. Non-GIS users usually are confused by the GIS orientation of a dedicated GIS and by many features and many pages of documentation provided for GIS users. DBMS and other non-GIS users are best served by a more general product.

2. To develop GIS applications for Release 9 developers must first learn the sophisticated, data-centric world of Radian technology. Radian Studio lets them get started sooner for a faster, stronger development effort with Release 9.

3. Radian Studio is ready now for DBMS users and applications developers. It can be put to work immediately by power users to view, analyze and transform GIS and non-GIS data. It would be unfair to those users to make them wait while additional features for interactive GIS or to support point-and-click users are configured and deployed.

Therefore Manifold has packaged the Radian engine in two products, a generic product, Radian Studio, for general purpose DBMS and GIS data applications that will be released first and a dedicated GIS product, Manifold System Release 9, to be released next.

Radian Studio

Manifold is introducing a new product, Radian Studio, to deliver the Radian engine in a developer/power user configuration for both GIS and non-GIS users. Radian Studio also allows GIS developers to start learning Manifold's new technology.

Radian Studio is not intended as an interactive GIS even though the visualization capabilities it provides to facilitate data manipulation will make it a fine tool for many GIS purposes in the hands of power users. Radian Studio will work side-by-side with any existing installation of Manifold 8 or prior with no conflicts, and can open any project file created by Manifold 8.

One inspiration for Radian Studio was Manifold's Database Commander product of years past, a DBMS-oriented product that provided a "control panel" for manipulating data. Commander delivered the power of Manifold's selection and data transformation capabilities in a table-oriented interface for general DBMS and non-GIS use. Radian Studio is analogous to a vastly expanded Commander product with immensely greater native DBMS, programming, analytic, parallelization and SQL capabilities and vastly expanded, modern user interface.

The Radian Studio product provides the Radian engine packaged within an interactive GUI designed for:

* Power users seeking a "Swiss Army knife" universal tool for GIS and DBMS data - Radian Studio's interactive GUI provides sophisticated access to data, queries, scripts and other elements of complex projects for viewing, editing, transformation, analysis and execution with a primary emphasis on SQL and programming languages. A vast range of capabilities, functions and operators enable interactive editing, transformation, analysis and modification of data. Numerous import and export and data source capabilities provide access to an enormous range of data.

* GPGPU developers seeking faster time to market - Automatic GPGPU parallelization within Radian SQL and Radian functions enables applications developers to prototype and to create third generation GPGPU applications without spending years learning how to code such applications in lower level environments.

* DBMS applications developers seeking better analytic infrastructure - Hundreds of pre-built functions and operators enable DBMS developers to create faster and better analytic applications. Radian Studio can be used as a standalone environment to power the application or as an interchange and control panel application utilizing data within other DBMS servers or as both.

* DBMS users seeking an agnostic control panel - Radian Studio's ability to connect to many different data sources - such as all the major DBMS products - using Manifold's sophisticated new dataport technology provides a "one stop shop" for simultaneous, combined access to many different data sources at once, allowing data to be moved between data sources and new combinations of data and local and remote queries to be created. Radian's performance means Radian Studio will not be the bottleneck.

* GIS applications developers - With Radian Studio developers can prototype and then build new, value-added GIS applications utilizing the power of Radian. More and more vertical markets require the combination of superior analytics coupled with superior capacity and rendering speed that only Radian provides. Radian Studio provides the full, unlimited Radian engine API so developers targeting GIS markets can begin learning the model right away.

* Power users seeking a head start on Release 9 - Radian Studio provides a head start on learning the new technology also utilized within Manifold System Release 9. Because both Radian Studio and Release 9 are built on identically the same Radian engine they both share the same SQL and many of the same GUI interfaces. Experience with Radian Studio will directly translate into a faster start with Release 9.

Radian Studio Beta Test

Manifold would like to invite any interested Manifold licensees to apply for participation in a beta test program for Radian Studio. Beta testing is expected to be brief, one to two months, followed by commercial product release.

To apply to participate in beta testing for Radian Studio, on or after 4 January please write from the email address used for your Manifold license to tech support at the published tech email address with a subject line that includes "Radian Studio beta test" with a statement that you would like to participate. Please briefly describe your use of Manifold to date as well as any DBMS, SQL or development expertise you have outside of Manifold. Please do not use this subject line or contact method for any other purpose, such as asking questions about Radian or other products.

Tech hopes to acknowledge all letters but that may take a few days or a week or more. If you are selected for participation you will be notified by email. If you are not selected you will not receive an invitation but will not receive a decline. Manifold cannot provide further guidance, information about Radian or feedback on the selection process. Some applications not selected initially may be invited into subsequent programs.

Beta testers interested in exploring localization options will be able to do so from the beginning of the beta test.

Manifold System Release 9

Manifold System Release 9 is a dedicated GIS product built on Radian that is the new technology successor to Release 8. Manifold is not at the present time announcing a beta test program for Release 9, nor is Manifold announcing sales of Release 9. Manifold expects to issue Release 9 for sale after Radian Studio, most likely in the first half of 2016.

GIS power users interested in Release 9 should procure Radian Studio when available. Power users will be able to accomplish many GIS tasks involving the manipulation of GIS data with Radian Studio. They will also be able to begin learning fundamental Radian technology and technical capabilities that are used in Release 9.

Release 9 will overlap Radian Studio since both are built on identically the same Radian infrastructure. In many ways 9 will be a superset of Radian Studio given that it also will have the full Radian engine API but in addition will provide dedicated GIS capabilities and dialogs to serve interactive GIS users and casual, point-and-click needs.

Manifold expects that many participants in the Radian Studio beta will also be Release 9 users. Their feedback in the beta will help guide final configuration decisions on Release 9 and thus will guide the timing of Release 9 publication.

One hallmark of Radian technology is it is highly configurable. This design feature enables easy creation of new applications and new features both by Manifold and by users. Manifold expects to utilize Radian configurability to issue many updates to Release 9 in 2016.

Licensing

Both Radian Studio and Release 9 will follow existing Manifold licensing methodologies using serial numbers to distinguish specific product configurations from a limited set of common download and installation packages.

Radian Studio licenses will not be offered in a License Server configuration. Runtime licenses will be offered some reasonable time after initial release. All Radian Studio and Manifold 9 licenses will be 64-bit licenses, authorizing both 64-bit and 32-bit capability on 64-bit Windows systems and 32-bit capability on 32-bit Windows systems.

Radian Studio and Release 9 products will be licensed for use on Microsoft Windows operating systems. Manifold at present does not plan to offer non-Windows versions in 2016.

Comments, Suggestions and Further Information

Manifold welcomes all comments and suggestions following the tips given on the Suggestions page at http://www.manifold.net/info/suggestions.shtml

Manifold cannot provide any additional public information on either Radian Studio or Manifold System Release 9 prior to release of these products. When these products are released the web site will provide detailed information.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go out to Art Lembo and Tim Baigent for their contributions in the Radian Test Platform program. Thanks also to Cyril Perret for contributing the first native-language translation of the Radian localization file, into French.

Manifold would also like to thank all Manifold licensees for their patience during the extensive development of this spectacular new technology. Radian parallelism is the first time in the history of the computer industry that any company has succeeded in creating such general purpose, automatic parallelism in a commercial product. Many other teams that have tried to accomplish this task, including large and well-funded teams backed by some of the largest companies in computing, have failed to accomplish what the Radian engine now delivers.

Thanks to the patience and the support of Manifold licensees, Manifold users will be the first to enjoy the performance and power of a truly parallel, uniquely modern GIS.

Radian is a registered trademark of Manifold Software Limited.

Manifold User Community Use Agreement Copyright (C) 2007-2021 Manifold Software Limited. All rights reserved.