Will Gorman’s Blog

Since we announced Agile BI back in 2009, we’ve been busy developing the initial set of features that demonstrate how a BI developer can quickly build models and analyze data within our ETL product, Pentaho Data Integration.  This past week, Jake Cornelius, our Director of Product Management, demonstrated Agile BI at the TDWI Bake-Off.  The audience was impressed, voting for Pentaho in the “Cool Stuff” category.  The team is now executing on its final feature sprint, and we’re aiming to release RC1 of the product around the end of March.  Check out the most recent milestones over on Agile BI’s community website!

We’ve been working hard at Pentaho to deliver the first milestone of Agile BI.  A little over a month ago, James Dixon, our CTO, presented to the community the initial concept, which includes integrating dimensional modeling and visualization within Spoon, our ETL environment.  Since that time, James and the engineering team at Pentaho have been sprinting towards this release, making the source code available in the open, along with adding additional capabilities including the ability to persist models and visualizations.

You can download the first milestone and begin experimenting with the beginnings of what we are considering phase 1 of the Agile BI initiative, which includes the ability to quickly model and visualize a single fact table metadata and olap model.  Feedback is always welcome, check out the Agile BI forum for more discussion.

Want to try and win a free copy of Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers?  Go visit JavaRanch.com and ask a question about the book in the Other Open Source Projects forum between now and the 16th of October, and you’ll be eligible to win one of the four books being given away.  I want to thank JavaRanch for promoting the book, they have over 100,000 Java Developers on their mailing list and a very active forum community.

There has been a lot of buzz recently about Pentaho’s acquisition of LucidEra’s ClearView technology, now known as Pentaho Analyzer Enterprise Edition, including this detailed writeup by Julian Hyde. But one
important aspect of this acquisition that has gone unmentioned, which I am most excited about, is the addition of Benny Chow to the Pentaho engineering team.

At LucidEra, Benny was the Director of Engineering and was responsible for the development of ClearView. In his short time here at Pentaho, he’s already had a great impact on our engineering efforts especially with the integration work necessary to make Analyzer an integral part of Pentaho’s User Console. Let me be the first to publicly welcome Benny to the Pentaho team!

This week, Matt Casters spent the week here in Orlando, working with engineering and product management on our next big project.  I’m very excited about the work he’s been doing with Kettle 4.0.  Also this week, the engineering team is working towards delivering BI Platform 3.5 RC2.  I’ve found myself working in a lot of different projects, primarily Mondrian and Pentaho Metadata.

Also this week, we released 3.5 RC1 of Pentaho Reporting and BI Platform.  If you haven’t already, I recommend downloading Pentaho Report Designer and BI Server 3.5 RC1 and giving it a whirl.  It includes a lot of goodness, including Mondrian 3.1.1, Kettle 3.2.1, and of course Pentaho Reporting 3.5 RC1, which includes major enhancements including side-by-side sub-reports.  Your feedback will help us release a very solid stable version.  Thanks!

I just got back from a great trip to San Francisco, where Mike D. and I represented Pentaho at the Google I/O Sandbox.  In addition to getting my free Android phone and playing some serious air hockey, I also got the chance to meet a lot of great people.  Mike and I got to meet a many of the folks on the Google Web Toolkit team, and I know they were very happy that they can now talk about the Wave project and their participation in it.  I can’t tell you how excited I am about Wave, and also how excited I am for the future of GWT and HTML 5.0.

There are so many great things happening within GWT at the moment, that Mike and I will probably get GWT trunk building so we can start playing with it.  This includes dynamic script loading, better hosted mode support, along with fantastic reports to help optimize your GWT compile sizes.

Another surreal moment for me at the conference was when Steven Canvin of Lego showed off the WiigoBot, one of my many Lego robots, on stage during the second key note right before Wave came on.  I’m a big fan of lego, so much so that I created the first ever Lego bar chart and presented it during the Sandbox event:

You can find instructions to build your own out on the Pentaho’s Wiki, including having it work with the Pentaho BI Platform!

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.

Google just announced Java support for their App Engine, the first 10,000 developers can register now for the alpha release.  App Engine has been live for a year, and already has 150,000+ registered developers working in Python.  I wonder how many more developers will flock over to write caffeinated cloud code.  Once I get in, I hope to see what will be necessary to get the suite of Pentaho software running.  Stay tuned…

Over the past few months, I’ve been working in my spare time on Pentaho Reporting for Java Developers.  Working on the book has been a lot of fun, I’ve learned a  great deal about Pentaho Reporting in the process, and I’ve enjoyed working with Thomas and the Report Designer sprint team here in Orlando.  Right now I’m wrapping up the final chapter, and will be doing a lot of work updating earlier chapters based on the great work that the team has done with the Report Designer.

Over on Packt’s website, there is a much more detailed description of the book.  Check it out, and order your copy today!