General user portal for easy pentaho intergration.

[guzaldon]

I'm looking for suggestions of solutions that others have successfully deployed.

We are working on deploying some advancements to our reports and other aspects of our system. I of course got some good buy in to use pentaho.

We are wanting to easily integrate in pentaho into an existing framework such as drupal (6.X what we are looking at now) that is mainly php and has some ability to use modules for xlmrpc and some older modules for soap type client. I'm wanting to take an SOA approach to deploying the pentaho solutions using the ServiceView to utilize the SOAP capabilities built in.

I haven't really dabbled in php or much with the SOAP applicabilities of pentaho nor with general use portal frameworks.

Any one out there got any suggestions of solutions, as well as any experiences with doing such thing or tips for login transparancy, displaying report/dashboarding, and etc.

I'm really interested to see what everyone out there as came up with. I know there has been some success stories so why not let them shine.

Thanks,

[jwright]

You might look into the CAS single signon server. This is an open source single signon solution that is supported by Pentaho, and has clients for PHP. Perhaps Drupal is even set up to use it out of box.

I haven't used it, but plan to investigate this to provide integration between Pentaho BI and a custom Java application. I'm hoping this will allow me to link Pentaho reports/dashboard directly from the existing application.

--Jeff Wright
ThotWave Technologies

[bugg_tb]

pentaho and liferay are partners so expect to see some stuff relating to them some time.

oh and nic, fix the typo in your signature :P

[guzaldon]

thanks for the replies.
Jeff -- drupal does have that CAS and the php guy is looking into that we are hoping it does the trick.

tb-cool we'll check out liferay I completely forgot that the partnership was announced. From intial look it seems a bit like the jboss portal so i wonder if it'll be easy to deploy in.

thanks for the tips. Anyone else got any suggestions.

Nic

[Taqua]

For bridging the GAP between PHP and Java, there are several solutions.

(1) You could use the commercial Zend-Engine. But as PHP is stateless, while Java lives from being stateful, with heavy caching and costly optimizations in place, this not a natural fit. But for completeness, it should be mentioned.

(2) You could run your PHP code inside a JVM, using this project (GPL): http://www.caucho.com/resin-3.0/quercus/
This way, your calls to Java would be as fast as you can invoke reflection on it.

(3) You could use Web-Services (SOAP and the whole WSDL stack). Cool, if you do complex things like RPC calls, but in my eyes, totally unnecessary if all you want is to call another web-application (the Pentaho-Server running elsewhere).

(4) You could use a special PHP/Java-Bridge, which is yet another way to do RPCs. It gives you more performance than the plain web-services (according to the claims on the site). http://php-java-bridge.sourceforge.net/pjb/

or (5)

you could forget all the experimental and highly geeky stuff and setup a plain Pentaho web-server and then use ordinary HTTP-calls to call the Pentaho-Web-Server from your PHP application. For the Pentaho-Server a HTTP-Get request coming from your PHP application is as good and as valid as a request coming from a browser. So fire up your HTTP-Get function and call the XAction with parameters and eventually needed cookies to grab the generated content, trigger processes or do whatever else the Platform allows you to do.

For the UI stuff, like parameter pages and so on, Pentaho is able to devliver XML files, which you can parse in your PHP application to use them as base for your own forms. For reports, you can either play proxy or you can embed the reports in your PHP pages in the same way, reports are embedded in JSP pages for our dashboards.

[guzaldon]

thanks for the different approaches for php and java.

I'm thinking since there is a lot of pressure to get some things out that are "visible" which appears to be the "easiest" is step 5. which to be honest was along the lines we were thinking of getting it up and "visible" quickly with good functionality to just use links and parse the xml in the php to build the forms to gather the veriables and the such.

we have a deadline coming up this friday to show some progress that does not require there to be intergration yet, but I would like to get the UI guys moving it. I'll take this info back with me to the team to discuss the best solution in regards to the "general use" portal that also has the awesome functionality that pentaho helps to provide.

From what I can tell from my initial scans of liferay, I'm liking it seems a bit easier than jboss portal and supports the same standards so intergration should be easy. The question there remains if I can get buy in from the UI guys they like php but I like java, but they usually listen to me.

Thanks agian for the help and the very helpful information. I'll be checking out the tales from the reporting crypt for sure.

I'll be sure to post back with some updates.

[guzaldon]

If anyone is asking the same question here to themself definently take a look at liferay.
Just after playing around with it for about 20 minutes, I can see how with just building some basic "portlets/appilcations" one could quickly interact with a pentaho server to atleast run reports. It almost seems as if you could just about use the "web form" sample to gather input and pass it to the Pentaho server via request out of the box. Then probably with a lil tweaking to the "web proxie" sample be able to proxy the rest for you. Initial impressions leave thoughts that both solutions out of the box could fit together nicely.

This probably explains the partnership. :-)

So we'll see how true the first impression rings true.
I don't think it'll be a hard sell to further investigate.

Thanks lot guys.