CFBI 4th Meeting Turnout

Last night’s meeting was a cozy but a good one.

Will Gorman from Pentaho graciously presented on Pentaho’s OLAP Solution (Mondrian) and I presented on MicroStrategy’s equivalent (Intelligent Cubes).

Another worthy note is that we had a announcements for job postings…

Companies present at meet (and recruiters) were looking for one of each:
- Informatica Developer
- MicroStrategy Developer
- Senior BI Developer
- Junior QA/Java Developer

It seems to be a great time to be working in IT in good O-Town. If you want to find out about our next meetings, jpb opportunities and networking, check us out at our CFBI Page and become a member.

Central Florida Business Intelligence (CFBI) – Fourth Meeting

Great news! We have two presentations scheduled for our upcoming Monday meet:
1. Pentaho – OLAP / ‘Mondrian’
2. MicroStrategy OLAP / ‘Intelligent Cubes’ Reporting

I’m pretty excited to present on MicroStrategy along with Will Gorman on Pentaho’s side. This cannot be anything but very exciting, see you there.

We will host our fourth meeting at DeVry University July 18th, 7-9 p.m.  (across from the Millenia Mall)

Location Address:
4000 Millenia Boulevard
Orlando, FL 32839
407 355 3131

For updated information, go to the CFBI page at linkedIn.

IzPack Installer Panel List for Pentaho Installer

As promised, here is an ordered (I think) list of all the necessary panels for the IzPack installer. I have included notes on each panel’s content (or purpose) as an aid for the upcoming posts on this installer.

Notice how the few first and the few lasts panels would apply to any installer we wanted to create. It wouldn’t be too difficult to create a ‘base’ installer out of this one for future projects

An IzPack Installer For Pentaho’s BI Products For Fun

I thought it would be fun to use IzPack to create a combined installer for both Pentaho’s Intelligence Server and Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle). This is the first of what I hope will be a short series of posts outlining the creation of an IzPack installer. For me, the hardest part of learning IzPack was understanding the framework used between the different types of components. Hopefully, this post series will help a few of us get up to speed a bit quicker.

Manually installing both the Pentaho Server and Kettle is not difficult or tedious. This installer just makes installation more convenient. I am in on way affiliated to either IzPack or Pentaho, just like both products a lot.

For the first post in this series, I am going to define each screen needed for the installer to gather all necessary information and perform each task I believe is needed.

Lastly, want to learn more about the technologies involved? Go http://izpack.org/ and http://www.pentaho.com/ for way better information than you’ll find here.

Next post coming shortly!

Central Florida Business Intelligence (CFBI) – Second Meeting

Yup, we got a decent name now.  Pretty soon, we’ll have a logo and all.

We plant to have our second meeting at DeVry University May 19th, 7-9 p.m.  (across from the Millenia Mall)

Location Address:
4000 Millenia Boulevard
Orlando, FL 32839
407 355 3131

Agenda:
Announcements and introductions.
Hadoop Talk by Jordan Ganoff.

For updated information, go to the CFBI page at linkedIn.

Hope to see you there.

Orlando BI Meet – Update

Short report on our first meeting.

Turnout was about 16 people. Pentaho graciously provided a location, food and drinks. Ideas flowed for a few hours. We have a list of topics of interest, are seeking presenters and sponsors and intend to meet on a monthly basis for all sorts of fun.

We decided to join forces and create the Central Florida Business Intelligence (CFBI) Group. We will be keeping all electronic communication at LinkedIn so please join if you are not a member yet. Its free of course.

I will keep this list open for a bit hoping to guide people there until traffic here dies down at which point I’ll close it.

Thanks for all who showed up and shared your time; hope to see you next time!

Orlando BI Meet April 18, 6PM at Pentaho HQ (Orlando)

I am pleased to announce that a few of us will be having our first Business Intelligence Meet in Orlando on April 18th.

We plan on meeting at Pentaho Headquarters Monday, April 18th at 6PM.

It will be an informal, meet and greet, in the hopes of getting a local BI community going.  Doing Analytics,BI and related nowadays, I’ve struggled a bit finding peers in Orlando to share information with.  Hopefully, there is a silent majority of BI people in Orlando wanting to meet.  Neat stuff.

Meeting Details
Date: Monday, April 18th
Time: 6:00 P.M.
Location:
Pentaho Corporate Office
Citadel International, Suite 340
5950 Hazeltine National Dr.Orlando, FL 32822, USA

Pentaho User Group – Orlando at LinkedIn

Orlando BI Google Group (think email list)

Feel free to make contact on either one; hope to see you there!

Is Your Eclipse IDE Slow? – Look at Bug 312038

If you recently or not so recently installed a newer release of Eclipse (Helios is current at time of writing), does starting this new release take forever? Does ‘initialize Java tooling’ stall for ages at 1% or 30%? Did you have to revise your workflow so that you don’t have to use Eclipse anymore?

You, like me, may have Bug 312038 – JRE Container hasChildren locks up the UI for more than 30s.

For me, starting Eclipse or building was taking minutes at times… something you can quietly hide until you have peers reviewing code behind your back and impatiently point out that you suck. These symptoms happened across all subsequent installations of Eclipse I tried so there was no saving me.

In the end, I followed Paul Austin’s directions on Comment 8 which I here steal:

Paul Austin says:

I have found out what the problem is. The code which is looking for src.jar and
src.zip is not finding the file as eclipse is looking in the following
directory.

/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.6.0/Home

But the src.jar is in the new location.

/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0_22-b04-307.jdk/Contents/Home/src.jar

I copied the src.jar file into the old location and now it works.

I found this out as it was also hanging when I went into the Preferences to
look at the installed JRE’s and it was hanging there. I then did a thread dump
and looked for the source code which told me it was looking for the src.jar or
src.zip file.

I have been happily humming along for days now. Worth a post indeed, I can barely wait for the next peer review to show off my smoking rejuvenated Eclipse!

IzPack Installers

IzPack is a software packager for building installers for your applications. It is an open source alternative to retail products like InstallAnywhere and InstallShield. IzPack generated installers run on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Because of this, IzPack creates a single cross platform installer. This installer is fully functional and behaves identically across Windows, Macs and Linux. It is a mature project having recently reached 10 years. Lastly, it is an open source Apache Licensed V2.0 Project.

IzPack has a very active online community where people with different experience levels contribute. Even the project owner, Julien Ponge, is quick to lend a helping hand.

Besides it being free to use and redistribute, one of the most attractive features is the ability to write once and run anywhere (really). I recently had to research creating an installer at work for both Windows and Linux and IzPack proved itself beating all other alternatives.

IzPack has many other features which would prove valuable to many people.

For example:

• Uninstaller – Izpack provides the option of creating an uninstaller to undo/remove/delete all actions performed by the installer. By default, Izpack can ‘remove installed’ artifacts from the OS but complete ‘restore to original’ can be accomplished with a combination of backing up pre-install, scripting and deletions.
• Highly modifiable – most default features can be extended to create customized objects for any installer. Some community participants have even suggested features which they have, in turn, added themselves back to IzPack. Neat!
• Can be built with Maven and Maven rocks – enough said.
• Can run external scripts (bat, sh, etc.).
• Can run ANT scripts. – This one feature alone helps me use ANT in all its splendor from IzPack making me look like a hero and I need all the help.
• Localizable installers – IzPack provides multiple language options pre-install and provides translations for every element by default. One only needs to translate one’s own text.
• Can do silent installs – Properly developed, all IzPack installers can be built to run as silent installs and use a ‘properties’ file for otherwise prompted inputs.
• Can do command line installs – Useful if he operator only has SSH into a computer, IzPack installers can be built to command line mode so that they can be run from a prompt.

You can read about other features at the project’s website features page.  Also, Julien did a presentation and slides are available online which are worth a good look regardless where they are hosted.

I am not certain if I will get to build our company’s upcoming installers or when will these get built.  I know IzPack will easily fill our needs and I hope I have the opportunity to use it in a professional capacity soon enough.

Flex OLAP Cube – updated

I’ve added ability to consume URLs whose output is XML as a data-source for Flex OLAP Cube. Check it out

Going thru this exercise has helped me understand a bit about creating data cubes and the uses they serve. This is but one of the many interesting (to me) things I am exposed to at work. Doing this from scratch provides me with insight unattainable with a ‘shrink-wrap’ tool.

Note – I had originally fetched data from accross the web but had to store xml files internally for show and tell. Enjoy.