Will Gorman’s Blog

This weekend a few of us from Pentaho attended BarCampOrlando 3.  Aaron Phillips gave a great intro to Hudson, demoing how easy it is to install and configure your apps for continuous integration.  Nick Baker gave a talk on project Shandor, Pentaho’s new name for our Java XUL UI Framework.  I gave a live demo of the new Pentaho Report Designer, showing off some of the new features that the guys on the reporting team are working so hard on.

I also got to attend some interesting talks, learning more about Django from Joshua Blount, as well as learning more about Adobe’s raw image support.   I also attended Robert Dempsey’s talk Transparency In Agile, and learned more about his hosted scrum solution Scrumd.

Over the next few weeks, part of the engineering team at Pentaho will be working towards making it easier to get access to your data.  The two use cases we’re addressing in the short term include accessing your SQL data, along with uploading a flat file (CSV, Excel) to drive a report or chart from within Pentaho’s user console.  Our general approach for both of these scenarios is to use Pentaho’s Metadata layer to abstract the querying of data sources.  This allows us to use a common interface and common widgets in our client apps.  To do this, we’ll be extending Pentaho Metadata to include new physical model implementations.  The team has started to prototype some of these capabilities.  We’ve added a web services layer to Pentaho Metadata, and also have started work on the physical models as well as our common widgets, which use our Java / GWT XUL UI framework.

We’re also spending a lot of time thinking about the long term direction of our metadata layer.  I’ve created a community project page for the Metadata project, with links to documentation, binaries and source to make it easier to get involved in the project. Doug will be hosting a live community webex in the next couple of weeks to have a general conversation about where we should take the metadata layer.  We want to make it as easy as possible for folks to start using Pentaho, and we’re going to make that possible through our rich and easy to use metadata layer.