DreamFactory 2.0 Beta Now Available

Written by Terence Bennett | July 6, 2018

After many months of hard work, we’re announcing official beta availability of DreamFactory 2.0. We appreciate all your feedback on DreamFactory 1.x and have integrated tons of your suggestions and ideas into the 2.0 release. We think you’ll like the many new features and performance enhancements.

We've partnered with Bitnami to make it super easy to install the DreamFactory 2.0 beta. You can download the Dreamfactory 2.0 beta here and install it easily on your favorite server, cloud or desktop platform.

If you'd like to participate in the DreamFactory 2.0 beta program, sign up here. Our beta program provides you with direct access to our support engineers as well as priority attention from the core DreamFactory engineering team. They’ll help you quickly get up and running with DreamFactory 2.0, help you upgrade from DreamFactory 1.x to DreamFactory 2.0, and answer any questions you have about the new features.

Also see this video for an overview of new features in DreamFactory 2.0

The key themes for DreamFactory 2.0 were improved security, API customizability, modularity, performance, and scalability. Here's a summary of the key enhancements in 2.0:

Security

Easy integration with Active Directory and LDAP.
Easy integration with Facebook OAuth, Twitter OAuth, Google OAuth, and GitHub OAuth.
More flexible role-based access controls. End users can now have different security permissions for different apps.
More flexible authentication with JSON web tokens (JWT) and API keys. You can now set session timeout rules, authenticate users with user names and passwords, make APIs public, or distribute API keys to specific developers.

API Customizability

Implement and automatically document RESTful APIs from scratch with custom scripts.
Customize API business logic with server-side scripting in JavaScript, Node.js, or PHP, with additional languages to follow.
Improved API configuration UI for building custom APIs.

Modularity, Performance, Scalability

Fully modular architecture re-built using the Laravel PHP framework.
Install only the packages you need.
Use either NGINX or Apache web server (we like NGINX).
Pick default SQL database of choice (no longer limited to MySQL).
MongoDB is pre-installed and the REST API for Mongo is ready to go “out of the box”.
Higher scalability and performance for large-scale transactional mobile and IoT applications.

Overall, DreamFactory 2.0 has been architected to provide:

World-class scalability & performance for high-volume, transactional use cases.
Easy integration with AD and OAuth.
Highly flexible role-based security at the user-app level.
Easier API customizabiliity.
Lightweight installation so you can deploy only the packages you need, plus pick SQL DB and file storage of your choice.

We've put a lot of work into DreamFactory 2.0. Stay tuned for new DreamFactory 2.0 docs, videos, and webinars coming in the next few weeks. We'll post updates on our blog, Twitter, the Community Forum, etc., as some of these new resources become available.

Note also that DreamFactory Enterprise will be going into beta soon! DreamFactory Enterprise is a separate product that provides reporting, provisioning, and governance for multiple DreamFactory instances. If you'd like to sign up for the DreamFactory Enterprise beta program, go here.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments below or ask away on the DreamFactory developer forum. We’re eager to help!