Open Source Solutions

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]