FME News for the Week Ending 17th December

Hello FME users, and welcome to a proper newsletter version of What's Up Wednesday.

FME and the log4j Security Vulnerability (CVE-2021-44228)

You have probably heard that a security flaw exists in the Apache library log4j and that it has a 10/10 rating for seriousness.

In short, FME is NOT affected by this flaw.

Although this library is included with FME, my understanding is that it's not used in a way that can be exploited. Of course, we'll still update it to a secure version as soon as we can, and may offer a patch for older FME versions. Plus in some cases, you can remove the library to ensure that there is no problem.

For more details, see this information page.

FME Releases

The newest FME available is now FME 2021.2.1 (build 21797), which was published last week. You can check out the What's New file to see what has changed (the previous release build was 21784) but they're all very specific items.

New updates usually occur on the first Tuesday of the month, but I suspect the next release will be the week after, on 11th January. Don't hold me to that, though!

European News

I seem to have a number of items from Europe this week, particularly The Netherlands.

On Tensing's blog, certified professional Martin Koch covers FME Server scheduling "at the touch of a button". I've seen Martin present at the FME User Conference and so - if you speak Dutch - this is probably a must-watch presentation.

At Red Geographics, Inge has been busy creating the map that graces the cover of next year's GeoHipster calendar.

Hans also passed on a tip from Inge about how connections in Workbench retain their colour, even if they are hidden!

Meanwhile, Nordend is a small company looking for a new employee. Although their address is in Belgium, Google told me their post is in Dutch. Personally, I suspect it might be Flemish, but either way, it looks like they are putting together a strong team and I think this is a good opportunity for someone with the right FME skills.

In con terra's "FME zum Kaffee" series, the latest video deals with error trapping in FME workspaces. This means designing a workspace to stop potential problems or errors from happening. For example, using a GeometryFilter to remove unexpected geometry types.

It's in German, but the automatically-generated English subtitles are good enough to follow along. And when you've watched the video, don't forget to try the con terra FME Advent calendar too.

Deprecated Formats

For various reasons, FME2022 has more than the usual number of format deprecations. This community article lists both past deprecations and upcoming ones. There are 11 formats planned for deprecation in 2022, for example.

This community article explains expected GDAL-related deprecations.

The Twelve Days of FME

The Twelve Days of FME contest is still ongoing, and now on puzzle number 5. This requires you to identify which transformers exist in a workspace.

Each one you correctly identify gives you another entry into the grand prize draw on Friday.

Incidentally, the final puzzle in the 12 Days of FME will be launched live during the Friday live stream - and can only be answered at that time! So be sure to tune in and watch.

We'll show the answers to puzzle 5, carry out puzzle 6, and pick our overall winner for the contest. Join us on https://www.twitch.tv/manitobamark or https://www.youtube.com/c/MarkIrelandAtSafe at 8am Pacific on Friday.