Pentaho Integration & Integration

[Andreas Kollegger]

Pentaho is pretty great, a powerful collection of reporting & analysis
tools and client applications. All the pieces and associated
terminology take some getting used to as a user, and present some
challenges as a developer. At the moment, I'm struggling with the
right approach for integrating and packaging a reporting solution
based on Pentaho with the server components of GATHER. As two
separate, complementary applications things are mostly
straightforward: GATHER collects XForms instance data, transforming
the data into database entries; a Pentaho solution connects to the
GATHER database, allowing ad-hoc reports to be run.

But, this is with Pentaho running as a completely separate
application, connected only through the use of a common database.
Also, Pentaho is built with Ant scripts and circular dependency
problems that make it difficult to extract individual components
(something that GATHER is committed to avoiding in the architecture).

So, this week I am trying out different approaches for combining
GATHER with Pentaho into one integrated, modularized deployment.

-Andreas

[Jonathan Jackson]

Andy -

Based on our conversation yesterday and my conversation with their sales
force, perhaps in the short term we want to deploy as two separate apps to
make our lives easier, given that a big focus of theirs is cleaning up the
install? I think its reasonable that they only take through a common
database layer at this point as long as we can integrate more features into
their portal if necessary.

Thoughts?

- j