The project I'm in the middle of encompasses three different but equally compelling goals:
- To move Pentaho forward in providing common layers across our core pillars (reporting , analysis, data mining, ETL and dashboards).
- To provide a proof of concept for the Pentaho XUL Framework, an architecture built to help us support common UIs across all of our applications and tools .
- To provide a common way of describing and managing the information needed to connect to a database.
This required a lot of up front work on the part of our lead Pentaho XUL developer, Nick Baker. Nick has plumbed an architecture for Pentaho that makes it possible for us to define a user interface in XML (specifically, using the Mozilla XUL specification), and use a common set of wrapper libraries to render the UI in SWT or Swing, without rewriting any of the UI, and reusing a great amount of the business logic code. There are also plans to begin a XUL-to-Web 2.0 library as well, which will cover most of the UI technologies that we use for the Pentaho projects.
Interested? Download the source and demo, take it for a ride, inspect the code and let me know what you think. Here are the home pages for both the Pentaho XUL Framework project, and the Common Database Connection Dialog proof of concept.
Common Database Connection Dialog
Pentaho XUL Framework Project
Go ahead and post here, on the wiki, or shoot me an email. I look forward to your reactions and suggestions:)
kind regards,
Gretch
PS. All you Kettle users & developers, here's a chance to weigh in on some needed UI changes for Kettle's database UI... don't miss the opportunity!