Open Intelligence

11 Comments Add your own

• 1. Mpume  |  July 31st, 2006 at 7:08 pm

  Hi,

  I think it would be nice to integrate JFreeReport. I for one have been enjoying some of the simplicity of the Pentaho designer but I am still convinced Pentaho is for big projects that require more than reporting.

  One thing I must add about OpenReports is that the screenshots that you have do not do your fantastic product any justice. Business Intelligence is about turning data into information and having screenshots with plain reports is not quite as convincing and seeing screenshots of nicely formatted reports. I as a developer can see past the plain screenshot but I am willing to bet other people are not.

  It might be worthwhile having a contest for users to submit screenshots.

  Thanks for the wonderul work.
  Mpume

• 2. eswenson  |  August 1st, 2006 at 12:36 am

  Hi Mpume,

  Thanks for the feedback on JFreeReport, I will include some form of integration in the next release and see what kind of feedback I get.

  Having a contest to submit screenshots or sample reports is a great idea. I would like to add fancier reports and more interesting data to the OpenReports distribution, but I have not had a chance yet.

  Anyone who has a sample report or screenshot, feel free to send it to me. I will plan on putting together a contest before the 2.0 final release.

  Thanks,
  Erik

• 3. Gretchen Moran  |  August 2nd, 2006 at 5:33 pm

  Mpume,

  I am very interested in your feedback about Pentaho! What exactly makes you feel that Pentaho is only for bigger projects?

  Being the community leader for Pentaho, I can tell you that the nicest part of the progression of the Pentaho projects is our focus on making sure that each component of the platform can be used a la carte, embedded in yor application or ours, in this case our Reporting Server. But alas, you are not first person to come away with the mistaken impression that Pentaho is “too big” for the straight forward smaller projects - a message we will surely clear up, I promise!

  And Erik, great work integrating JFreeReport! JFreeReport is a simple yet sophisticated tool for Reporting and we know that you will be as impressed with it as we are as you get to know it better:) Please let me know if you need any assistance, and be sure to check out the forums for JFreeReport and associated tools at http://www.pentaho.org/discussion and http://www.jfree.org/phpBB2/index.php?c=3&sid=15512e3c6a0761d9be2e72e212508d8b.

  kind regards,
  Gretchen Moran
  Pentaho Community Connection

• 4. eswenson  |  August 4th, 2006 at 3:41 am

  Hi Gretchen,

  Thanks for taking the time to comment.

  I do feel that OpenReports, has some advantages over Pentaho from a reporting standpoint, especially for small to medium size businesses. Things like a web based administration console and easy to create Query and Chart reports make it easy for prospective users to get up and running quickly without the need to edit XML or download Eclipse plugins.

  One the other hand, OpenReports is focused reporting and does not offer OLAP and ETL tools. Or even a community leader…there’s only me.

  - Erik

• 5. Mpume  |  August 8th, 2006 at 10:39 am

  Hi Gretchen,

  Erik has mentioned some of the points I wanted to mention. I was a Java developer in my past life and was able to get Pentaho working with no problems. However when I tried to get the guys from the reporting writing departing to start working on it I met some resistance. These guys do not have a full understanding of Java and J2EE and are mainly database people. When it came to explaining the whole concept of the .xaction file and how powerful it could be, this proved too complicated. To be fair some of the resistence was due to the fact that it was an Open Source product.

  When I introduced OpenReports along with iReport the guys where much more positive and where able to get going much quicker. This off course is due to the web user interface. OpenReports used concepts they were familiar with and this allowed them to be more productive immediately.

  OpenReports was able to recognise a date parameter and automatically rendered a date selector, whereas in Pentaho I couldn’t find a date parameter. I was able to set a date parameter as a string. This is all very well for me, but to try to explain to a none developers that you can create a custom parameter page with a date selector, they stop listening half way through your explanation.

  These are a few points that led me to conclude that Pentaho in its current form you need a developer to create your solution. OpenReports once installed report writing individuals can create the solution.

  Mpume
  http://www.mahalasoft.za.net

• 6. Gretchen Moran  |  August 9th, 2006 at 4:03 pm

  Mpume and Erik,

  Thanks for the excellent responses, feedback on our project is invaluable! We agree we have some work to do before Pentaho is completely user friendly, and we are working very hard in the direction of web administration, web querying and other tools that make using Pentaho much easier - and much more fun! It’s great to hear that Mpume’s experience as a developer was most excellent, I hope that in a short time you might be able to demo Pentaho again with the usability tools that your users require:)

  And if you have followed our incredible growth in 22 months, you know it won’t be long before we have progressed leaps and bounds in that regard, so please do keep an eye on our progress:)

  I am not too familiar with OpenReports, but my original interest in this post was Erik’s re-visiting of JFreeReport, which you must know is the core reporting engine in the Pentaho platform, and we have donated many lines of code and man hours into beefing up the usability tools and features for JFreeReport. I love the idea that the OpenReports community can expand their solutions from OepnReports into Pentaho seamlessly, when the re

  Thanks again for the terrific input, it is very motivating when your project direction is validated by real open source users!

  kind regards,
  Gretchen

• 7. Gretchen Moran  |  August 9th, 2006 at 4:07 pm

  Accidentally hit “Enter” in the middle of my thought

  I am not too familiar with OpenReports, but my original interest in this post was Erik’s re-visiting of JFreeReport, which you must know is the core reporting engine in the Pentaho platform, and we have donated many lines of code and man hours into beefing up the usability tools and features for JFreeReport. I love the idea that the OpenReports community can expand their solutions from OpenReports into Pentaho seamlessly, when the business requirements extend into directions such as ETL, data mining, analysis, dashboarding, etc. With Erik’s integration of JFreeReports, you can drop a OpenReports report into anyt Pentaho solution, burst it out to departments or users based on region, or other custom criteria, schedule those reports for execution, just a few features of the top of a very long list. Think of your reports as part of a process instead of a deliverable at the end of a task. BI is very powerful, reporting is a cornerstone of BI. OpenReports can provide your reporting, Pentaho can help you with crossing the bridge to business intelligence.

• 8. Mpume  |  August 9th, 2006 at 5:53 pm

  Hi Gretchen,

  I totally agree with you about Pentaho coming in leaps and bounds. I remember having a look at Pentaho before the sequence plugin was available and there was no JFreeReports designer. I struggled to make headway but now with the tools available I am able to deploy a report in no time.

  I will definitely keep watching both products as I believe different situations will require different solutions. I hope with time I can start my own company in South Africa that will use Open Source BI tools. I cannot say how grateful I am for the wonderful work you are doing.

  Mpume

• 9. ankit  |  September 8th, 2006 at 11:21 am

  hi,
  i want to use this pantaho report designer for my swing based application.but i feel some difficulty with it to use.can u please tell me any tutorial so that i can creat a report using pentaho report designer.i have also download pethao report designer wizard.please send me a link.
  my mail id is ankitgarg.iet@gmail.com
  if u have any sugestion for me.you are most walcome.

• 10. william  |  April 12th, 2007 at 6:53 am

  hi Erik and others,

  i’m interested in finding out more about the integration between JFreeReport and OpenReports for our own purposes in putting reports into web-application.

  I’m trying to run on the sample application for JFreeReport that you provide which is RegionalBudgetVariances.xml.

  1. My question is that how did u created the xml ? since i believed that the xml file that is being created JFreeReport exports the value from the TableModel.data.

  I’ve tried to run my own xml file on the openreports and all data values just appear as “-”.

  Suggestions are most welcome.

  william

• 11. Leeroy  |  April 16th, 2007 at 4:30 am

  The advantage of openreports which is a plus point compared to other BI tool is that
  I was able to take an excel template and upload it on openreports and was able to open it from open reports. I guess this cannot be done with pentaho directly.

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