Bringing Pentaho to Firefox

Just got back from one week in Mountain View, more precisely in Mozilla headquarters. Without doubts one of the best group I've been in - and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

I always get back with a lot of ideas to apply to our projects and this time was not different; What was different is that I actually got hands down to implement it - a CDF jetpack:

The idea is to improve the user interaction with our dashboards. More than describe, I can show it with some pictures.



After I installed my jetpack, you can see in the status bar a new icon that will give the user access to some operations. If we click on any of the bookmarks we'll directly jump into the desired location. Alternatively we can start designing a new dashboard directly.




The jetpack automatically detects that we're in a CDF-DE dashboard. Then it shows more options - in this case we can edit it or even bookmark it.




After we give it a name, it will be stored and available in our personal bookmarks. Those bookmarks will be associated with the firefox user profile and persist between sessions.



Once in that page, we can also remove the bookmark from the list.



I don't know what others may think but I really like this beginning. Brings the user closer to the data, and there's a lot of stuff we could do here. If you have any idea just tell them - as wild as they may seem.


That's it for now. It's not the only idea we brought from Mountain View but that will be in another post. If you find this useful, we can include this jetpack in a future version of our designer.

Building Pentaho 3.5 with the latest and greatest Reporting Engine

Pentaho 3.5 is out for a while, with the new Citrus reporting engine. Thomas and the rest of the Pentaho crew did a great job turning the mess that was the old Report Designer into a totally rewritten application with lots of new features.


But everyone knows that on the first version of a (re)new software it's inevitable to find problems. This is not an exception. Real world is very different from the labs. Here are some examples of this.


Gotta love open source; We have everything we need to be able to debug the problems. We were able to solve some and Thomas solved the nasty ones within no-time. Many thanks to the crazy German / Irish/ I never know.


Now the worst part - We have a shiny and working PRD but we need to make it work on Pentaho platform. One option is to use all the latest trunk that picks up latest PRD. Well... not really an option. Even I am not crazy enough to do that.


So I opted to keep using 3.5.0 GA but tell in the build process to get only the latest trunk of the reporting enging.


I use CBF for... well, everything. And CBF uses the main pentaho build process. We had to change an ivy file in order for this to work. I hate ivy. Everyone tells me it's a good thing, but from my experience it's only good for them.


Anyway, after some fight, here's the file that we need to replace. It's under bi-platform-assembly/ivy.xml. For cbf you can drop it in patches/target-build/bi-platform-assembly/ivy.xml. You'll also need the latest ivy version (2.1.x). Just drop the jar in the ant lib dir.

Also set this property in your build config file:

dependency.pentaho-reporting.revision=TRUNK-SNAPSHOT

Now you can have fun with the latest and the greatest.

CDF - Dashboard Editor. Version 0.2

Somewhat to my surprise, this is actually working for a lot of people. Thanks for the great feedback everyone.


One of the most pointed issues was the fact that New -> Dashboard didn't work. It was not implemented at all because at the time we developed that (pentaho 3.0 was the current version) the menu hooks didn't work. They do now, so it makes sense to correct it.


Other very annoying bug was that we were unable to save to a folder that had whitespaces


Anyway. Both of it is fixed and 0.2 is just out the door!


Have fun!


(oh, and hire us for the implementations ;) )

Pentaho / Lucidera - an excuse for the big questions?

It's amazing the amount of discussion generated by Pentaho's acquisition of ClearView.


The concerns it raised have nothing to do with this move; Everyone agrees it makes sense: Lucidera came to an halt, they had a valuable product and valuable resources, Pentaho took the opportunity and acquired something that fills a gap into it's own offering.


So, what's the problem here? ClearView is only available for paying customers.


This raised a lot of questions and some frustrations. A few hours ago Seth Grimes summed some of the concers in a blog post. Even questioned if Pentaho was shifting strategy, which deserved a prompt response from Pentaho's CTO James Dixon.


I don't agree with Seth in the strategic part. It's not by having closed-source components that Pentaho will stop being an Open Source company (I also like the term open core). They payed money to Lucidera; They make money from the subscribed customers; They want to give more value to those customers. What's the problem?


I do agree with Seth when he says that the message pentaho passes is confusing; I always have the feeling that Pentaho faces an identify problem and is a little bit ashamed of it's closed source components. When we access the main Pentaho page we can hardly tell it's a O-S company. Apart from the logo, everything is "buy, try, evaluate" etc. When we visit the sourceforge page we are clueless about the commercial approach. It's important to clarify that. I'd really like to see in pentaho main page some bold sentence with something like "We are a commercial company; We have an opensource product with some closed source add-ons that give productivity boost to our clients - the ones that pay for our salary".


For me, the million dollar question that has to be answered is:

If my company chooses to go for the opensource version today, will we end up with a stale product one year from now?

When users see something released only in a closed source form, they fear everything from now on will be released as closed source only. It's a genuine fear. We recently saw the Dashboard Designer, the chart editor and now ClearView being released for paying customers only. Pentaho's answer can't be "the community won't let that happen". While the community indeed plays a big role here, Pentaho will always lead the way. The worst that could happen to Pentaho is having the community loosing it's interest. So it's indeed a tough decision for them when they need to make a call if something goes open source or closed source.


But we must not forget something: Pentaho needs it's community. Most of it's business and visibility is made through the open source version and they absolutely can not change that. It's much worst from them as a company than it is for us, community users or paying customers.

Pentaho Reporting Explained

Finally got my hands on The Book! While I was very happy with the overall quality of Pentaho Solutions I have to admit that I was more anxious to get this one;

Thomas Morgner and the JFreeReport team did a very big refactor in version 3.5 of JFreeReport - codename Citrus (so big that was enough to trigger the release of version 3.5 of the Pentaho platform). And Will, as part of the JFreeReport and Pentaho development team was able to sync the release of the book with the release of the software - can't be more up to date than this.

So, not only I have a new software to play with, I also have a new book that will guide me through all the changes and improvements.

The book is not aimed to be an intruction manual on how to use reporting in the Pentaho platform, on the contrary; Will gives extensive instructions on how to use the reporting engine regardless of the environment - a java swing application, a webapplication, whatever; Just call the APIs and you'll get a report in whatever format you want. Of course, the Pentaho platform comes as an added bonus.

It does a great job explaining the structure of the engine, how to work with the report designer, how to integrate with several datasources, the export options, how to call the api and many other subjects. Fortunately it's not one of those books that waste 300 pages with the printed api, so expect to read it from start to end, probably just skipping through some (not very extensive) java code that explains how to do task N that you'll just thank to god that it's there in case you need it. Unfortunately the book can't cover everything; I was hoping to have more details on olap reporting but found only some simpler examples.


Conclusion: If you're planning to do reporting in java/webapps/pentaho/whatever just buy the book and don't complain about missing documentation for the next 2 years

CDF - Dashboard Editor. Want a test drive?

If you were in Barcelona for the Pentaho Community Meeting, you know what this is. If you were *not* in there, well... it's a dashboard editor... for CDF.


You can download the package from here . It includes the sample I built in Barcelona. No time for instructions at this time, but shouldn't be hard to find what to do with it.


This is *not* intended for production unless you really know what you're doing. We can't guarantee that it will work for you at this point - we do guarantee that it works for us and our clients, so if you need consulting services for your project contact us.


As I said, the code will be released as open source with some added value services on top of it - as soon as we have time to do it.


Have fun and provide feedback

(ps: the new dashboard button in the menu isn't implemented yet. Open a sample and save with a new name)

Interacting with users: The CDF CommentsComponent

Now that CDF allows us to do most of the "core" stuff when we want to build a dashboard for pentaho, we can aim some steps higher; We're working heavily on allowing users to iterate with the data; In my view, the ideal BI system is not a static application but a place where several users are able to discuss the information to make additional question and draw conclusions.

We just built a new component for CDF that allows users to make comments on a dashboard. Without any additional configuration needed, it stores the comments in the hibernate database of pentaho (gotta love pentaho's customization abilities!) making them persistent.

This will be available in the next CDF version (or trunk, for the ones that use it)