Example dashboards

[jhaile]

Call me a purist if you want, I find the dashboard examples included in the Pentaho distribution to be a bad example of JSP development, and I wanted to see what other people's opinions are.

I am currently working on integrating Pentaho into a dashboard/web application. I am using Spring MVC, Hibernate, Quartz, etc. along with Pentaho technologies (specifically Kettle, Mondrian, JPivot, and JFreeChart)

Although it is obvious how to use Pentaho within the PCI, I have had trouble figuring out how action sequences should be used to integrate Pentaho components into your web application. (related post: http://tinyurl.com/g9nhu)

I find the extensive use of scriptlets, and very limited HTML markup in the SampleDashboard.jsp and SWDashboard.jsp to be following coding practices that are considered bad in the Java community.

Although I'd prefer to see dashboards following good standards, I can understand if these are supposed to be quick-and-dirty examples to get people up and running. My problem is that I couldn't very easily figure out how to follow good practices and use the Pentaho action sequences. Ultimately, I resorted to using JFreeChart, JPivot, etc. directly rather than using action sequences.

I'm curious what other people thing about the dashboard examples and what you are doing to create your own dashboards. Would anyone else like to see more real world examples following good practices, like using Spring MVC, Struts, JSF, or some other common web framework along with Pentaho solutions?

[dmoran]

Yes, very quick and very dirty. It was an attempt to show how to get to the outputs from a JSP and implement drill linking. Internally we have had many debates on the best way to implement dashboards.

We are hung up on not picking a technology that will "paint the platform in a corner" as many sites already have a preferred technology - JSP, .NET, portal, Ajax, hand HTML - whatever. We would like to work in any of those environments. Maybe that is too tall an order.

Going with the bazaar model - we put something out there that would get the discussion started. Your design ideas and "best practice" input are welcome. I mentioned in your other post that the next dev cycle will concentrate on better APIs and integration - this includes wrappers that will make dashboards easier to build and deploy.

Hopefully we can get a good community discussion going.

Doug

[jhaile]

I definitely understand that Pentaho is a work in progress, and I'm happy to provide insight into my experiences getting the platform up and running.

I also understand not wanting to "paint the platform into a corner." However, I do think it would be good to somehow separate the Java code from the JSP markup as that is generally considered the best practice.

I am co-founder of a fairly, new open-source project called JSecurity. (documentation in progress ;-) ) One of our challenges is providing concise, good examples that don't paint us into a corner while also supporting the popular frameworks to make it as easy to integrate into your application as possible, regardless of framework.

One method of ensuring that the platform isn't painted into a corner is to provide examples using multiple frameworks - so have a Struts example, a Spring MVC example, a JSF, .NET, etc. That would a) help to illustrate best practices of using Pentaho in these various real-world implementations and b) Get people up and running faster who are using these framework.

In JSecurity, we separate out the "support" packages into optionally separate JARs and source trees so that users can pick from a variety of supported frameworks - and of course they have the option to just use the core library if it isn't something we've written support classes for.