Creating Tableau Extensions

Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning-fast performance. We will use Git and GitHub to save our work.

At this point we have installed various applications, tools and packages. In the next section, we will be putting this to work and developing our first Tableau Extension.

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript run time environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a browser. Node.js comes with the Node Package Manager (NPM) that helps us install the required software.

Let us start by downloading the latest Tableau Extension API from the GitHub. Note that this course was built using version 1.3.0

YARN is a package manager that we will use to obtain our external libraries. Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to download it again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.

I will help you understand the basics of what is a Tableau Extensions. We will talk about the structure and architecture of an Extension, understand what Extensions are and how they are used, and more interestingly, how they are developed.

ESLint is a static code analysis tool for identifying problematic patterns found in JavaScript code. Rules in ESLint are configurable, and customized rules can be defined and loaded. ESLint covers both code quality and coding style issues. This will help reduce bugs as help ensure the quality of our code.

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter. It enforces a consistent style by parsing your code and re-printing it with its own rules that take the maximum line length into account, wrapping code when necessary. This will help keep our code looking nice and save the tedious work of formatting.

In this section, we are going to develop our first Tableau Extension, although, it will not do much for now, we will build our skeleton and make use of all the installed applications, tools and packages.

No course can cover everything that you will require. The Web development space is huge, but we will talk about how you can maximize your learning on this course.