On Twitter today, Lance Walter asked me to go into the Ark Business with him, and Gareth Greenaway asked for entertainment. It must be a rainy Friday afternoon

I'm not sure about Lance's offer, but I did tell Gareth the following story, from tweet-start to tweet-end. This isn't word for word as I tweeted. 'Tis a bit expanded, but the tale is the same.

Once upon a time there was a young penguin named Tux. Tux decided to set off on a journey through IT Land. Now IT Land is a dangerous place, full of hackers fighting crackers, and ruled by those in the Ivory Tower and the acolytes of the Megaliths.

Along the way, the adventurous Tux met the Dolphin, the Elephant and the Beekeeper. They made a pact on the Lucid glyph to become a Dynamo of IT, bringing power to the datasmiths of the Land.

They met many Titans from the Megaliths on their Quest. The Beekeeper used the open source bees to open the scrum along the way, blocking the hookers with their sharp claws.

Some of the Titans were helpful, some, not so much.

The Dolphin was empowered by the Sun. But the Sun was consumed by a powerful Oracle. The Elephant, too, gained a powerful ally, and they do Enterprise against the Oracle. The band of the Quest was broken, and Tux was sad.

The Era of Lucid thought ended, but the Dynamo yet powers the Lucid Glyph, and Tux can rely on the Dynamo and the Beekeeper to predict a future clear of the Oracle.

And thus this quest ends, but another soon begins, where Tux will meet new friends and new foes. Will Beastie and the dæmons be allies? Will the Paladin in the Red Hat be stalwart?

Perhaps we'll find out at OSCON, for Gareth suggested that an assemblage of geeks would enjoy this story, and we'll see if OSCON thinks our tales worthy of a keynote slot in 2010.

Do you recognize all the characters in this tale? Maybe the links will help.

What say you, OSCON? Would these tales make a worthy Keynote?

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As promised in my post, "Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers First Look", I've taken the time to thoroughly grok Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers by Will Gorman [direct link to Packt Publishing][Buy the book from Amazon]. I've read the book, cover-to-cover, and gone through the [non-Java] exercises. As I said in my first look at this book, it contains nuggets of wisdom and practicalities drawn from deep insider knowledge. This book does best serve its target audience, Java developers with a need to incorporate reporting into their applications. But it is also useful for report developers who wish to know more about Pentaho, and Pentaho users who wish to make their use of Pentaho easier and the resulting reporting experience richer.

The first three chapters provide a very good introduction to Pentaho Reporting and its relationship to the Pentaho BI Suite and the company Pentaho, historical, technical and practical. These three chapters are also the ones that have clearly marked sections for Java specific information and exercises. By the end of Chapter Three, you'll have installed Pentaho Report Designer, and built several rich reports. If you're a Java developer, you'll have had the opportunity to incorporate these reports into both Tomcat J2EE or Swing web applications. You'll have been introduced to the rich reporting capabilities of Pentaho, accessing data sources, the underlying Java libraries, and the various output options that include PDF, Excel, CSV, RTF, XML and plain text.

Chapters 4 through 8 is all about the WYSIWYG Pentaho Report Designer, the pixel-level control that it gives you over the layout of your reports, and the many wonderful capabilities provided by Pentaho Reporting from a wide range of chart types to embedding numeric and text functions, to cross-tabs and sub-reports. Other than Chapter 5, these chapters are as useful for a business user creating their own reports, as it is for a report developer. Chapter 5 is a very deep dive, very technical look at incorporating various data sources. The two areas that really stand out are the charts (Chapter 6) and functions (Chapter 7).

There are a baker's dozen types of charts covered, with an example for each type. Some of the more exotic are Waterfall, Bar-Line, Radar and Extended XY Series charts.

There are hundreds of parameters, functions and expressions that can be used in Pentaho Reports, and Will covers them all. The formula capability of Pentaho Reporting follows the OpenFormula standard, similar to the support for formulæ in Microsoft Excel, and the same as that followed by OpenOffice.org. One can provide computed text or numeric values within Pentaho reports to a fairly complex extent. Chapter 7 provides a great introduction to using this feature.

Chapters 9 through 11 are very much for the software developer, covering the development of Interactive Reports in Swing and HTML, the use of Pentaho's APIs and extension of Pentaho Reporting capabilities. It's all interesting stuff, that really explains the technology of Pentaho Reporting, but there's little here that is of use to the business user or non-Java report developer.

The first part of Chapter 12, on the other hand, is of little use to the Java developer, as it shows how to take reports created in Pentaho Report Designer and publish them through the Pentaho BI-Server, including formats suitable to mobile devices, such as the iPhone. The latter part of Chapter 12 goes into the use of metadata, and is useful both for the report developer and the Java developer.

So, as I said in my first look, the majority of the book is useful even if you're not a Java developer who needs to incorporate sophisticated reports into your application. That being said, Will Gorman does an excellent job in explaining Pentaho Reporting, and making it very useful for business users, report designers, report developers and, his target audience, Java developers. I heartily recommend that you buy this book. [Amazon link]

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