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 ;) )
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
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:
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.
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.
Friday, October 2, 2009
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
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