Reporting Tales - projects tag

Not likely to break (Rank 10)

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:22:00 GMT

Pentaho Reporting has been ranked #10 in Enerjy's analysis of open source projects that are not likely to break.

Enerjy performs some static code analysis on the source code and computes several metrics on how well the software is maintained. Thanks to our paranoid programming, which assumes that the users of the code (in most cases: I) are way to stupid to code correctly all the time. Therefore we write the code in a way that breaks early and hard - including strict assertations, strong typing and explict checks for Null-References as soon as we receive parameters on public or protected methods instead of happily assuming that the humans never produce bugs and accepting everything first (hoping that things will continue to go well) and acting surprised if - no: when - later in the process the assumptions have been proven wrong.

Always protect yourself when coding - you never know what diseases you might catch otherwise.

Resurrection: The Wizard is back

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 13:47:00 GMT

"It was horrible!" a witness told our reporter at the place of the incident. "We thought we were safe now, after the trial and so on. And now that! How should we feel safe now, knowing that this monster runs free again?"

On Friday, after three years of menace, a anonymous citizen of our community gave the vital information where to find that foe commonly known as "Report Design Wizard" and even risked his life by assisting in arresting that dangerous person. Our governor, in an attempt to appease the upset masses, ordered a swift trial and (after a swiftly organized popular vote), sentenced the "Report-Design-Wizard" to death and commanded his execution at the very same day.

Officials in cooperation with the governor's private physician confirmed the death of the Wizard at 3:46 PM. The dead body was buried in a near by cave. "It is a victorious day for all of us." governor Pilatus said. "Our society must stand firm against all threats from inside and outside of our community. This event, once more shows that vigilant citizens help all of us." Pilatus continued.

As the whole community was about to celebrate the death of the Wizard, no one was nearby to prevent the upcoming disaster. The escape of the resurrected Wizard might not have been noticed, if not a local group of concerned women were about to properly seal the cave. Apparently, they came to late.

At the site of the incident, local authorities currently secure the remains of what seems to be the major parts of the Wizards body. "It is nothing but a horrible mess in there." officer Longinus said. "The whole place is filled with torn SWT code and obsolete Castor-XML-models. Whatever happened in there, it definitely did hurt a lot. The Wizard's core seems to be missing, and according to the traces, something living has escaped from there."

Local religious authorities currently try to calm down the fearful citizens. "We cannot know whether the resurrected wizard will pose the same threat as the old one. Resurrection on this scale does not happen a lot these days anymore." a undisclosed source among the senior priests told us. "We simply cant tell how this divine event changed the Wizard's mind. It is very likely that the new wizard is still very unstable and not fully formed. We all should be very careful when interacting with him for the next weeks."

Historical sources seem to indicate, that resurrections like this have a great chance to transform even the worst of the communities enemy into a formidable and valuable citizen, who plays a important role in the integration of the disparate parts of the building blocks of our community.

Officer Longinus is convinced: "However the outcome of this story might be, it will be something worth to remember."

Source: http://source.pentaho.org/pentaho-reporting/engines/classic/wizard-core

Wanted: Report Design Wizard

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 11:54:00 GMT

The report-design-wizard has been sentenced to dead for unclean and undirected growth. Over last three years it threatened innocent users with a undocumented and unclean definition language that depended on several XML-hacks and a implementation of features that cannot be accepted in a civilized world.

After spawning an Ad-Hoc-companion, implanting itself into the Report-Designer and terrorizing innocent reporting-engine developers way to long, the government of the reporting-projects finally set out to end the threat this creature imposes to all of us.

Many atrocities have been committed by the wizard:

the file-format, based on Castor-XML-Serialization, is highly redundant and only defined in code.
the large dependency list of 60MB of JAR files for the sake of querying databases and for firing a preview, while the same could be achieved in 12MBs.
providing a report-preview using a embedded HTTP-Server, while the reporting-engine ships with fully functional print-preview
the wizard's execution and fileformat is inherently and unfixable tied to the Simple-XML fileformat, which is deprecated now; while the reporting engine provides a fully featured API to define and write reports to XML files.

The Governor of the development province of Pentaho-Reporting hereby offers a reward of 30 silver coins for all information that leads to the imprisonment of this foe, so that the hangman can finally end the suffering of this foul beast.

Warning: The Report-Design-Wizard is armed and dangerous and usually seen in companion with 12 other dangerous fellows. If you see them, do not try to arrest them yourself. Please call the local authorities for assistance.

Tame Team-Mate Meta

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 14:21:00 GMT

This is Meta. Meta is the newest player in the Classic-Engine team.

Meta is a little bit shy, as Meta is the new member in the Engine-team.

For a very long time, the Class-Engine team consisted entirely of Workers, Handlers and Factories. These guys tend to be a bit rough. You really have to know how to approach them. If you call them in the wrong way, they outright laugh at you, sometimes they even start to go totally crazy and produce garbage.

But workers are not very communicative. Entering the factory, looking around and asking loudly what happens when you push that shiny red button does not make you many friends there. To outsiders, the workers tend to be a bit cold. They know how to talk to each other and how to get the job done, that's sure. But introduce them to a new idea, and they may as well it you with their heavy tools.

Meta, on the other hand, is very communicative. Ask Meta something, and you will get a whole lecture with all the necessary (and most of the time also all the unnecessary) details. Whenever Meta enters a new place, Meta opens up the notebook and starts to collect all information available.

Meta is also open to outsiders. It is not hard to get in touch with Meta - just ask. Meta happily tells you what every worker does, how you best approach a certain worker or handler. Meta even knows what you must feed into a factory to get a certain product out.

Meta can be a great help to everyone who want to talk to the Classic-Engine team.

(But here's a little secret: Meta does not want to do any real work. Yeah, Meta talks a lot about how great everything works together, but don't ask Meta to produce something for you. Meta introspects, Meta knows, but Meta does not touch the dirty machinery.)

If you want to visit Meta and chat with it about the Elements, Attributes, Styles or Expressions, come visit Meta in the package "org.jfree.report.metadata" on the Classic-Engine Trunk-Branch in the Pentaho SVN repository.

And if it happens that you know a design tool or report-definition generator, introduce them to Meta. Meta always loves to make new friends.

Transforming JFreeReport into Pentaho Reporting

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 09:18:00 GMT

More than half a year ago, we did the (hurtful) step to move the JFreeReport forums to the refurbished Pentaho-Forums. At the same time, we also changed the name of "JFreeReport" to "Pentaho Reporting". (This change became necessary to avoid confusion between the independent JFreeChart and Pentaho's JFreeReport.)

Are a couple of changes are waiting to happen right now:

We will move from the SourceForge CVS repositories to the Pentaho SubVersion repositories
- SubVersion makes it very easy to create and manage branches. With CVS, this is not always funny, especially if your commits abort half-ways during a large merge.
- The public CVS repository at Sourceforge is awfully slow. It take ages just to check out the project. I heard many complaints about the low performance of the CVS repository, although I never encountered those problems (the developer's repository servers are very fast) before. Now, we solve this once and for all.
- And finally: With SubVersion, we can handle binary files a lot better. As our project has the habit of providing the libraries along with the project's sourcecode, we have to deal with many updates of binary files on a regular base. I will be happy when I can check-in jars, images and other binary content without having to worry about corruptions to these files any more.
We move the Bug-Trackers to the Pentaho-JIRA system

The Bug-Trackers of Sourceforge are nice for collecting bug-information, but they lack of CVS/SubVersion integration and they have no way of marking duplicates or connected issues.

In the future, we want to encourage the regular use of the bug-trackers. But that's no option if these beasts are hard to use for either the end-users or the developers. I guess I can speak with the voice of all developers, when I say, that I never stick long to solutions that do not work well. I usually work around non-working systems by finding alternative solutions. During the last five years, our work-around was to use the forum to receive bug-reports and to do the follow-up work when those beasts got fixed. It worked, but it is definitely not scalable at all.
And as final item of upcoming changes: We are going to change the version numbering schema to a less random schema.

The previous system of having an initial version (like 0.8.7) and then adding patch-releases to it (say, 0.8.7-10, where -10 marks the release as the tenth bug-fix release) was very uncommon, uncomfortable and as a user no one really knew when a version was stable enough to be used safely.

Therefore, starting with the "Classic-Engine" version 0.8.9 we now change the numbering schema to the well-known and well-accepted schema of having milestone releases (having the suffix "-preX" (like -pre1, -pre2, -pre3 etc), release candidates (suffix "-RCx") and then finally a stable release (no suffix any more).

The Classic-Engine will then evolve into Pentaho Reporting Classic Version 1.0.0. The Flow-Engine's next release will also adapt the new schema, we will increase the version number to 1.9.x to move it out of the numbering area of the classic engine (and to make clear that the Flow-Engine will be the successor of the Classic-Engine in the future).

And to make the list of upcoming changes complete, we are currently redesigning the 'reporting.pentaho.org' web-site. The current web-site mostly contained outdated and misleading information (our first deadly sin) and did not provide complete information about the engines or the design tools. And an Open-Source project without an home-page can be regarded as non-existent.

So stay tuned for the end of July - this summer will be huge!