Archive for the 'gwt' Category

Pentaho at Google I/O

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!

Experimental Action Editor in GWT

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