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)

Pentaho Reporting - The book (part 2)

2 book in 2 weeks. Looking great.


Full review will come later when I get my hard copy that I can take to places where the computer is not. But I've read parts of it in the e-book version;


If Pentaho Solutions is the book I'd kill for 2 years ago, Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers is the book I want and need now. Will Gorman's book comes in a perfect timing: Pentaho 3.5 is near GA (stable version, for the ones who still didn't understand Pentaho's naming sistem - believe me, takes time to get used to), and ships the newest version of the reporting engine. Thomas Morgner and his team did a great refactor and it's by far one of the biggest improvements done in years.


So, we have a new and much improved reporting engine that comes at the same time as a book that explains in detail how to use it. Who can ask for more?

Pentaho Solutions - The book

Roland Bouman and Jos Van Dongen took 6 months out of their family life and created this. And cutting to the chase, every Pentaho learner should thank them for that.


Pentaho is a very complex application due to many factors. For starters, the BI field is, by definition, a very sensitive field; the fact that pentaho started by combining distinct successful open-source projects - mondrian, kettle, jfreereport and weka - doesn't help when we want to learn exactly what's what. There are so many distinct applications that gets confusing to know what each thing is for.


All this makes the learning curve a very steep one. Until now. Trough over 600 pages Pentaho Solutions does a great job explaining all the Pentaho stack, where each of the components fit it and when to use what. And it doesn't stop there; It's impossible to do anything in Business Intelligence without some very solid knowledge of Data Warehouse. While this book is definitely not about it (this one is) still gives the novice reader the key concepts needed to read the book and go through the practical examples that are used.


The chapters are very well organized. They are in the same order as the topic appear when we are implementing a Pentaho solution. In the end the 600 pages even feel short, so many concepts it introduces. Don't expect to become an expert in pentaho; You won't master any of the components with this book only; you won't be a OLAP guru, a reporting wizard or even a etl master. But you will definitely know where to search for.


In my opinion, the ones that will benefit the most with this books are those guys with emails ending with @pentaho.com. It's so difficult to start playing with pentaho that a lot of newcomers feel scared and abandon it, resulting in a loss of potential user. This book changes all that. I wish I had it when I started playing with pentaho over 2 years ago. And I'm glad I have it know.

- "I want charts!" -"Flash, image or canvas?" -"Say again?!"

CDF's primary rendering engine for charts is JFreeChart, and there are a lot of reasons for that:

• Pentaho supports it
• We have a very good level of technical interaction with it, allowing us to do drill through, etc
• By generating an image, we can use it in static reports, print it, etc
• JFreeChart is really, really good. Does it's job. Period.

It has it's disadvantages, though:

• It's hard to interact with it. Being an image, all it can do is render image maps, so sometimes we have an hard time finding a particular value
• It's ugly.

I'm not very sensible to the second argument. I'm a fierce defender that a dashboard shouldn't have elements that distract you from what's really important - the numbers. But it's also true that users (and sales people ;) ) love eye candy. And the business users always like to do some show off, nothing wrong with that.

The first point concerns me, though. Should be easy to read information out of the charts, and sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes we need interaction with the data at a level that a PNG file can't give us.

On a recent team Mozilla metrics team meeting where I was showing a dashboard our team developed, I did a test to measure the reaction to find out exactly how important this issue is. I showed them the new dashboard using standard jfreechart components and near the end of the meeting I quickly swapped to the open flash charts version of them. The result was worst than I expected..

- Oh, WOW, this looks awsome!
- Hum... well, it's really the same thing, the information is identical
- I don't care! It's prettier. And look, there are popups with the numbers. I want this!

It's undeniable. It has a great impact. Since I work on both sides - developing the framework AND doing actual implementations, instead of fighting it, I can try to build the tools in order to allow the best of both worlds.

Working on a new charting engine for CDF has always been one of my objectives. After this meeting, it has become one of the short time objectives. This is a challenging task; Ideally, the framework developer part of me wants a layer that is independent of the rendering engine. That has a major problem - by doing so I'll probably have to settle with the least common denominator of all engine's functionalities, something that the other me - the one that has to implement each and every one of my client's requests - absolutely don't want to happen.

So I'll probably start by focusing on a good charting engine to pose as an alternative to jfreechart. Sure, there's support to open flash charts, but it's functionality is yet a bit limited. It just doesn't do what I want/need it to do.

I'm more inclined into one of this options (suggestions are welcome here):

• Flot
• FusionCharts
• Something else...
  

I would love NOT to use a flash-based solution. I'd rather use a canvas-based solution. But I won't even think about any of this technical constraints if I need to loose anything in the functionality side...


Cya in Barcelona next week!

CBF - Going underground

If you don't know what CBF is, don't worry. Hardly no one does. It's probably the most under-rated community project on pentaho.


CBF stands for Community Build Framework, and it's an alternate way to build your own pentaho distribution keeping the source untouched. Also simplifies upgrades, deploys and allows everything to sit in a well contained svn repository.


I still use on a daily basis what I started more than two years go in one of my first forum posts. And I can't imagine my life without it. Actually, I don't know how other manage their projects. It really amuses me to see how the thread with my tutorial for a datepicker in the secure-prompt filter is still heavily active after almost 2 years while CBF releases go almost unnoticed. C'mon, people still use .xactions?!

nicola:pentaho$ ls -1 -d project-* | wc -l
34

This listing on my project directory tells me that I have 34 different projects and variations that range from pentaho 1.7 to pentaho 3.5, stock or improved. Projects that I need to get up and running very quickly.


Here's a snippet of my day in terms of CBF commands:

• 9:00 - Carry on with the development of Mozilla metrics project. A quick svn up will allow me to pick the changes done by the team in the US: ant -f build.xml.cbf-3.0 -Dproject=metrics -Denv=pedro dist-clean all run
• 10:30 - An old client, still on 1.7 called saying they changed an algorithm used to generate a report: ant -f build.xml.cbf-1.7 -Dproject=etsa -Denv=pedro dist-clean all run.
• 10:38 - Report fixed and commited to svn. Update on client side, done.
• 10:39 - Back to the Mozilla implementation: : ant -f build.xml.cbf-3.0 -Dproject=metrics -Denv=pedro dist-clean all run
• 17:50 - Developments ready to be deployed. Lots of new code and patches, so I'll do a full remote deploy: ant -f build.xml.cbf-3.0 -Dproject=metrics -Denv=staging deploy-all . Magically, my changes can be seen on the other side of the ocean
  
• 18:00 - Commit done, time to look at the pentaho 3.5 project. Build a bare35 project and just: ant -f build.xml.cbf-3.5 -Dproject=bare35 -Denv=pedro dist-clean all run .
• 18:40 - Detected a minor CDF bug in pentaho 3.5. Fixing in with: ant -f build.xml.cbf-3.5 -Dproject=cdf -Denv=pedro dist-clean all run .
• 18:50 - Commit done to google code. Hudson will auto-magically pick it and will be used in the next pentaho build. Time to go home
  

I admit that many times I have the feeling that I'm on grounds that noone ever stepped on, but what alternatives do I have to quickly manage multiple projects with multiple configuration on multiple versions?