Enhancements to Forio Broadcast
One of the benefits of offering Forio Broadcast as online software is a complete change in the nature of upgrades. Since we launched the site five years ago we have added new features on a regular but fairly quiet basis. You will find that some of these enhancements simply make existing simulations work better. Other times you might find a surprising new capability to use when building a new simulation.
It's easy to look past such continual evolution, so I wanted to highlight some of the subtle improvements and new capabilities made available in the last six months.
Simplified URLs
You may have noticed last Fall that our website went through a complete makeover. As part of this, we've simplified all of the Forio and Broadcast URLs. No worries, though-- all old URLs are automatically forwarded to the new ones.
| Site | Old URL / New URL |
|---|---|
| Forio Broadcast Manager | http://broadcast.forio.com/ https://forio.com/broadcast/ |
| Forio Broadcast Express Simulation | http://broadcast.forio.com/sims/simname/ http://forio.com/simulation/simname/ |
| Forio Broadcast Professional Simulation | http://broadcast.forio.com/pro/simname/ http://forio.com/simulation/simname/ |
| Forio Broadcast Documentation | http://broadcast.forio.com/broadcastdocs/ http://forio.com/broadcast/docs/ |
We've also removed some of the extra query parameters from the URL, such as the FD_rand that was automatically added to ensure each page was loaded fresh from the server. This hasn't been needed since the days of Netscape 4, and thankfully those days are long behind us.
Unicode Compatibility
Surprisingly, the web industry is only recently moving towards a uniform way of storing and displaying international characters. Originally, Forio Broadcast supported the Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set, which correctly displays American and most Western European characters but not many Eastern European or Asian ones.
We've have now switched to using the character set UTF-8 for displaying all web pages, user details, and other dynamic information. This means that if you are a Broadcast Professional user from Hungary, your name will be displayed with all the correct accents.
An important technical note: while all information stored in the database is encoded as UTF-8, the actual HTML source is still expected to be saved in Latin-1 format (which is then converted to UTF-8 when displayed). This is because existing simulations using the Latin-1 format would be garbled if the source files were interpreted as UTF-8. Eventually we'll let you specify the encoding when you upload your HTML files.
Confused by the above? Trust us - set up a user name with accented characters and it should just work. But if you want some details on what this all means, browse Wikipedia or read this article.
Model Import Upgrade
We've been working hard the past few months to improve our model import capability. In particular, Forio's new partnership with isee systems (read more about it here) has allowed us to do a significant upgrade on iThink/STELLA compatibility. Specifically, iThink version 9.0.2 has a brand new text file format that makes it easy for Forio to import and correctly translate the model. On a similar note, we've now integrated our "native" Vensim capability (which directly runs Vensim binary models) into our main server.
You can read more details about compatibility with models imported from other software packages in our online documentation.
Performance Improvements
If you are a Broadcast Professional user with a large simulation model, you may have noticed a significant difference in simulation speed kick in late 2006. In particular, we've sped up the initialization of heavily arrayed models. Some of our users are reporting improvements of 10-25x for that first step. This is particularly helpful for developers of large multiplayer simulations.
Enhancements to the Broadcast Manager
You should expect to see significant changes in the simulation management screens in the year ahead. In the meantime, there are a few recent minor improvements.
- Export/import runs. You may archive runs in an XML text file or move them from one user to another.
- Improved tracing of circular causality. The error messages for circular causality in the model analyzer now show the exact path taken by the circular calculations.
New Functions
We've added a number of miscellaneous functions recently. Most of these were added for compatibility with other software packages. Here's a sample.
- Array:
ARRAYCOUNTGT, ARRAYCOUNTGTEQ, ARRAYCOUNTLT, ARRAYCOUNTLTEQ ARRAYCOUNTEQ,ARRAYCOUNTNEQ, ARRAYACCUM - Historical:
DELAYSTATE, HIVAL, LOVAL, FORECAST, TREND, DERIVN - Mathematical:
ASIN,ACOS,ATAN,COSH,TANH,SINH - Miscellaneous:
EXPRND - New FML methods/properties:
$Lib.shuffle(), $Lib.PageName
Experimental New Features
In many cases, we implement features on a trial basis first and write full documentation second. Consequently, there's a number of items that are still in an experimental state and are not yet fully documented. I've listed a few of these below. I'll be writing posts in the next few weeks to fill in the gaps while we bring the documentation up to date.
- Reporting arrayed variables.. Probably my favorite new feature. Want to display a total of an arrayed variable? No need to create a variable just to sum it up. Instead, replace the array index with a
*, as in$Values.get("Sales[megacorp,*]")and the sum will be automatically shown. I'll be writing more about this soon. - View history for a past run. We've always supported the ability to archive old runs. But in the past, to see results from a previous run you had to re-run the simulation. Now with the new syntax
$Run.Values.get("Sales")you can retrieve results from a past run immediately, allowing you to display an old run (or better yet), create a table or graph comparing one run against another. - #SparkLineGraph. A tiny graph that can be inserted directly into text. Read more about it in How To Create Graphs.
- Simpler means of showing paged lists. The new
$Pagerobject makes it easier to show paged lists of high scores, runs, or users.
If you are excited by any of these new features, (or if you just have something to say), please leave a comment below. You can also email us directly at info@forio.com.
Posted by Will Glass
