Will Gorman’s Blog

I wanted to share with everyone a new open source project that I just released out to Google Code.  When using Pentaho’s BI Server, users create Action Sequences to pull their data from a warehouse and display it in a Report, etc.  Pentaho’s Action Sequences make it easy for business analysts to define their own process. Pentaho offers Action Components ranging from Analysis OLAP Views to XML Queries that can be combined to create an Action Sequence. Today, you can use one of our many wizards to generate an Action Sequence, or generate one with our Design Studio, a thick client application built on Eclipse.

To educate myself in Google’s Web Toolkit (GWT), I decided to attempt a port of our Design Studio over to thin client. I’ve made a lot of progress, including getting Dom4J running in GWT along with Pentaho’s Action Sequence DOM, an important library that parses and builds a document object model of an Action Sequence file. This week I’ve uploaded the first set of code, which implements input, resource and output parameter management, as well as the start of a couple Action Components, including SQL Lookup Rule and the JFreeReport Component. The project includes instructions to integrate into our latest BI Server, so you can right click, select “Edit Action”, and start editing your Action Sequence right in the browser!

If there are folks out there interested in contributing to this project, please feel free to check out the code, help out with requirements, graphics, you name it! I’ll be working on the project in my spare time.

DOM4J4GWT
This is a light DOM4J Implementation, designed to run within GWT’s client environment
http://code.google.com/p/dom4j4gwt

Penaho Action Sequence DOM 4 GWT
This project modifies Pentaho Action Sequence DOM so that it may run within GWT’s client environment
http://code.google.com/p/pentaho-actionsequence-dom-4gwt

Pentaho Action Editor
This is the main project, that allows you to edit Pentaho’s Action Sequences in the browser. It includes instructions for deploying into Pentaho’s 2.0 BI Platform
http://code.google.com/p/pentaho-actioneditor

This week, the Pentaho team released our first release candidate of our 2.0 Business Intelligence Server.  The entire Orlando team worked many months on the brand new features incorporated into this release.  I’m going to highlight some of the most exciting features that we’re all proud of at Pentaho:

A New User Console
In this release, we built from the ground up an entirely new user interface designed to greatly enhance the user experience of our Business Intelligence Server.  Taking advantage of Google’s Web Toolkit’s amazing technology, we were able to deliver a complete Web 2.0 dynamic experience to our business users.  We’ve modernized the look and feel of our analysis views and adhoc reporting tool, along with greatly simplifying permissions management.

Data Source and User Management
For the first time, our Community Edition Business Intelligence Server also comes shipped with an Administration console, for management of Users and Relational Data Sources.  In addition to our default support for direct JDBC and JNDI connections, we also have the ability to define a Pentaho Managed Data Source.  This makes it easy for business users to add their own data sources, without having to know the ins and outs of the Java Enterprise Container hosting Pentaho’s BI Server.

Metadata Row Level Security
Another important enhancement to our product offering is the ability to manage row level security from within our Metadata Layer.  In our first release of Pentaho Metadata, we implemented Model, View and Column Level Security.  In this release we extend our Security functionality to also include Row Level Constraints.  Check out the documentation!

There are countless other features that went into our Community Edition release.  At the same time, we’re also releasing our Enterprise Edition software, which includes features such as enhanced ETL Administration, along with many additional BI Server Administration and Configuration capabilities.  These are exciting times!