Comparison of v3 and v4
v4 was a complete rewrite of the application. It shares a lot of the similar UI aspects with the previous version but behind the scenes is completely different.
Technical differences
| Feature | Version 3.x | Version 4.x |
|---|---|---|
| Backend languages | PHP, MySQL | Node, GraphQL |
| Frontend languages | jQuery, requireJS | Typescript, React, Redux, GraphQL |
| Data generation method | on the backend via PHP | in-browser via Web Workers |
| Containerized? | Nope | Docker |
| Ease of installation | Easy | Harder |
Functional differences
Generally speaking, v4 offers more functionality than v3 in most ways - but it's not black and white.
v3 advantages
info
All of these are planned to be supported by v4. In order to get the new version released we chose to put these features on hold and release them later.
- Had additional Data Types: Regional Phone Numbers, Swedish Personal Numbers, Swedish Organization numbers, French SIRET/SIREN business numbers.
- Allows logged in users to share their configured data sets publicly via a URL.
- Has a REST API option to generate data programmatically instead of only via the UI.
- Had an option where you could provide the database schema and have it generate a data set configutation from it (downloaded version only). This was a neat contributed feature, but I want to tackle it in a different, more generic way.
v4 advantages
- Live preview panel. This was a big improvement: now you can visually see what you're generating as you're configuring your fields.
- "Take a tour" feature to demo aspects of the script and give users a quick introduction to what it does and how it works.
- New Data Types: Colour, Time. Plus numerous improvements and expansions on the existing Data Types.
- New Export Types: Typescript, Python.
- Much faster data generation with an improved visual display of how the generation is going.
Other notes
There were several goals with the v4 rewrite.
- First, be able to generate the data in your browser instead of the server. Hosting costs for the production site were exorbitant due to the popularity of the script, so by offloading the actual data generation to the client it made it more scalable and made it far quicker to do the actual data generation.
- Secondly, like mentioned adobe: show a live preview panel so you could see what data you were going to get, while you built it.
- Move to node and offer a version of it as a free, downloadable npm package. This is next up for development.