{"id":260,"date":"2008-06-12T12:45:38","date_gmt":"2008-06-12T19:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/2008\/06\/12\/pentaho-fat-clients-breaking-into-double-digits\/"},"modified":"2008-06-12T12:45:38","modified_gmt":"2008-06-12T19:45:38","slug":"pentaho-fat-clients-breaking-into-double-digits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/2008\/06\/12\/pentaho-fat-clients-breaking-into-double-digits\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentaho Fat Clients: Breaking into Double Digits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Business Intelligence is a complex diverse space.  There&#8217;s a bunch of technologies that typically need to be combined together to get a comprehensive, end to end solution.<\/p>\n<p>One of the things that I believe is confusing for users of Pentaho is the sheer volume of clients that are available to &#8220;quickly and easily&#8221; build your solution.  The quickly and easily is predicated on the fact that if you need to build a &#8220;prompt&#8221; for a report, you know which of the fat clients to fire up.  Want to dynamically hide a field?  In order to do that you have to know that&#8217;s in a different fat client.<\/p>\n<p>I know of <strong>at least 10 different<\/strong> good ole fashioned, download and install to your desktop clients that you&#8217;d use if you were doing a full, soup to nuts everything used Pentaho installation.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Design Studio<\/li>\n<li>Report Designer<\/li>\n<li>Report Design Wizard<\/li>\n<li>Mondrian Workbench<\/li>\n<li>Pentaho Metadata Editor<\/li>\n<li>Spoon (Kettle)<\/li>\n<li>Cube Designer<\/li>\n<li>Weka Explorer<\/li>\n<li>Weka Experimenter<\/li>\n<li>&lt;&lt;new fat client Pentaho hasn&#8217;t announced yet&gt;&gt;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is no easy challenge to solve for Pentaho.  Part of the open source mantra includes making each of the individual projects (Kettle\/Mondrian\/Weka\/etc) useful on their own, without some big Pentaho installation.  What that means is a challenge to make a UI\/designer\/etc that works &#8220;standalone&#8221; but could also be included in some master development environment?  That&#8217;s tough, and to date Pentaho has made only modest steps at this (Wizard inside of Designer).<\/p>\n<p>I have no good advice for Pentaho in this regard.  There&#8217;s a very good reason for keeping them as separate installations and I think it shows respect to the individual communities.  However, this is an issue for people coming to Pentaho as a full BI suite.  Does anyone have any good ideas on how to solve this pickle of a problem?  We should all help Pentaho with this as it benefits everyone to come up with a good way to approach the development tools (as a suite and as individual products).<\/p>\n<p>PS &#8211; My $HOME\/dev\/pentaho directory is littered with old installations.  Every time Pentaho goes from 1.6.0 GA to 1.6.1 GA the only way to ensure you&#8217;re getting the correctly matched versions is to upgrade all those clients.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Business Intelligence is a complex diverse space. There&#8217;s a bunch of technologies that typically need to be combined together to get a comprehensive, end to end solution. One of the things that I believe is confusing for users of Pentaho is the sheer volume of clients that are available to &#8220;quickly and easily&#8221; build your [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nicholasgoodman.com\/bt\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}