Thursday, March 12, 2009

Community Projects

I thought it would be appropriate kick off the blog with a roundup of the most active Pentaho community projects.

Community Dashboard Framework (CDF)

This project started out as a tech tip from Ingo Klose of SHS VIVEON AG way back in August of 2007. Since then it has become it's own project on Google Code. It has been included as a part of the Pentaho BI Server version 3.0. It is currently being led by Pedro Alves of WebDetails.


Pentaho Flash Charts

This project started life as an entry on Nick Goodman's blog in June 2008 and eventually found a life of it's own on Google Code. Due to popular demand, it is being included as a standard part of the Pentaho BI Server version 3.0. Nick Goodman of Bayon Technologies and Pentaho contributor Tom Qin are the main developers.


Pentaho Analysis Tool (PAT)

PAT is a GWT based analysis tool designed to replace JPivot in the Pentaho suite. It is based on an earlier project, Halogen, used for demonstrating the usability and features of the olap4j library. PAT is being led by Tom Barber, Luc Boudreau and Paul Stöllberger of Aschauer EDV GmbH. The project is starting to gain momentum and they could use more help. General mondrian/analysis knowledge, CSS, GWT and Spring skills are a plus.


Kettle Documentation en Español

The first full scale translation of a Pentaho documentation wiki space is underway. Tomás Di Doménico of Datalytics is leading the effort to translate the Kettle documentation to Spanish. A Kettle wiki space has also been created for an Italian translation of Kettle which I expect to start soon. If you are interested in helping out or would like to start a translation space of your own, contact me and we can get started.

Community Build Framework (CBF)


The CBF is another project being led by Pedro Alves of WebDetails with help from Daniel Einspanjer of Mozilla and Pedro Reininho. It is an alternate way to setup and deploy Pentaho based applications. Focused on a multi-project/ multi-environment scenario, it gives you the ability to switch from totally different projects on the fly, supports multiple environments (eg: development, production, worker1, worker2...), keeps changes to the original files from being overwritten in a upgrade and generally helps you manage your dev process. It has been recently upgraded to be compatible with Platform version 3.0.

Great things happening in the community - Thanks for all your hard work!

Doug



Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Hey Everybody

Setting up a blog has been on my to-do list for a few years now. I think it was even on my Q1 2008 quarterly objectives list - hmmm... little late on that one. I assume that since you are reading this, you are already familiar with Pentaho, you know me personally or your name is "Doug Moran" and you just googled your name to see what "the other" Doug Morans are like. For the latter, I am the "Community Guy" and co-founder of Pentaho Open Source Business Intelligence.

The intention of this blog is to post news, information and observations that I think the Pentaho community will find useful or at least mildly entertaining. I answer a lot of Pentaho related questions via email, the forums, in wiki comments, on IM etc. I will attempt to provide some of those answers here in case they are generally useful. Please feel free to comment and ask questions.

Doug