April 7, 2020

Announcing General Availability (GA) of DataSonnet

by Kent Brown in Announcements , IT Management , Open Source 0 comments

We are pleased to announce the GA release of DataSonnet, our open source data mapping tool. We developed the DataSonnet project to create an open source mapper that could handle complex hierarchical message formats while supporting visual mapping experiences simple enough for non-developers. 

Design goals of DataSonnet

This release expands upon the following design goals presented in our beta release from October 2019. In short, we set out to build a data transformation tool that is:

  • Open source – eliminate the vendor lock-in that proprietary mapping tools create and take back ownership and portability of your organization’s data transformation
  • Script-based – save and load as text, and run without compiling
  • Simple, yet powerful – capable of complex mapping by advanced developers, but easy enough to learn and use for occasional developers with common use cases

DataSonnet builds on SJSonnet, an open source Scala implementation of the JSonnet language, by adding:

  • Conventions for calling JSonnet when transforming data
  • Several additional function libraries useful to typical data transformation tasks and scenarios
  • Tooling to support working on data transformation problems

NEW features in this release

In this release, we are excited to bring you the following developments that add:

  • Mapping to/from Java classes
  • Improved XML support
  • Preservation of field order to support non-JSON use cases (EDI, CSV, flatfile, etc.) 
  • Regular Expression support
  • Use of DataSonnet with the PortX Integration Hub suite of products

With these new features, users can tackle a wide range of data transformation scenarios that we have worked through on integration projects with our customers. 

The word on the street

As any good software company would, our team has been using the tool extensively on our own projects. Here are some of the things ModusBox employees say about it:

“DataSonnet makes it very easy to map from data objects in JSON format to SOAP calls to a third-party server. It also makes it easy to build dynamic SQL queries based on the number and type of incoming parameters.” – Eugene

“I like DataSonnet because it is intuitive and easy to use, but one of the most powerful mapping languages I have ever worked with, even handling the tricky transformations that come up with EDI loops.” – Devang

“I’m an EDI analyst, not a heavy developer, but I’ve found DataSonnet easier to learn than most mapping languages I have worked with.” – Anne

We’ve had a great experience collaborating on DataSonnet with the open source community. The SJSonnet project has accepted several pull requests from our team, and we’ve committed our first pull request from a member of the community:

Hey, thank you guys for making this OSS! I think SJSonnet and DataSonnet are super solid, and a few of us at [my company] are really looking forward to an OSS data mapping library. So hopefully we can throw some good PRs your way and/or help work through some ideas on where to take it.” – Contributor

What’s next?

There are some big plans in the works for DataSonnet. Currently, our team is developing a fully in-browser, no-code mapping experience. Stay tuned for updates!

We invite you to use DataSonnet, provide feedback, join us in evolving the tool, and participate with our team in the community. At ModusBox, we’re all about inclusion. And, we believe that a world that includes everyone should be designed and built by everyone. And, that includes data mappers.

Learn more about DataSonnet:

DataSonnet website

Quick Start Tutorial

Cookbook


Leave a comment