In this case I'm more for baby steps. There was already an effort to extract the birt component from the framework to specialpurpose, it should not be
thrown to attic.
BTW, note that, depite its names, Birt is not only to be used for Business
Intelligence.
Jacques
Le 27/02/2015 10:08, Pierre Smits a écrit :
Hi Taher,
Indeed, all of those products you mentioned are skeletons. With additions
that make them into solutions. The bi component could be the core of any
kind of integration solution, whether that is the birt component or
external products like jasper or pentaho.
Basically i don't care how it is done. As long as it improves the feature
set and the adoption of OFBiz. If that means that we chuck current work (in
both bi and birt) to attic and start over, so be it. But if we can get some
strides made by enhancing (albeit through small steps) what we have, that's
ok with me too.
Best regards,
Pierre Smits
*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com
On Fri, Feb 27, 2015 at 10:01 AM, Taher Alkhateeb <
slidingfilame...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Pierre,
I would call the BI component more of a skeleton than a solution. In fact
many things (entities, services, etc ...) in it can be used in BIRT. But
you do not have charting, drill-down, styling, event model and many other
things that a full blown BI engine can provide (like BIRT, jasper or
pentaho).
Taher Alkhateeb
On Feb 27, 2015 11:22 AM, "Pierre Smits" <pierre.sm...@gmail.com> wrote:
We have OLAP capabilities in OFBiz: for each tenant a olap repository is
created via the entity-engine. We have cube definitions: dimensions,
facts
and star schemas are defined in the bi component.
I see interest.
Best regards,
Pierre Smits
*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com
On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 5:45 PM, Ron Wheeler <
rwhee...@artifact-software.com
wrote:
It seems that BIRT is really something like the Framework.
- It has some assets and code
- These assets and code are used throught the Base Applications and
SpecialPurpose components whenever you need to display a graphic or
dashboard, provide an interactive drilldown or want to produce a nice
report for display or PDF output.
It is not really a separate component.
Guess what! It sounds like a sub-project is the right way to handle
this
so people with the right skillsets can drive the process.
In the meantime, the list of tasks identified by Taher is a very good
starting point.
Any idea of the number of manhours required to produce an initial
toolkit
that the application developers could use to integrate Analytics into
each
component that requires it? How much of this stuff exists buried in
applications or in customized OFBIz implementation that could be
contributed.
Does anybody see why this is essential to the competitive position of
OFBiz or is it just a "nice to have"?
This goes back to my earlier commens and "marketing" research when
someone
was looking to get Gartner to look at OFBiz.
The lack of integrated Analytics would be a big negative in comparison
with other ERPs.
For building eCommerce websites reporting is not a big deal but if you
are
going to provide an ERP, the CFO is going to want dashboards, the
production manager will vote for the system that gives him strong tools
to
see comparisons and trends in order backlog, production, quality,
manpower
utilisation, costs, etc.
The VP HR is going to want graphs on departmental manpower costs,
overtime, expenses etc. that can be shown to the CFO and CEO at a
moments
notice.
Ron
On 26/02/2015 10:21 AM, Taher Alkhateeb wrote:
Hi Ron and everyone,
BIRT is very powerful but by no means easy! I was working for a while
on
developing an infrastructure for OFBIZ to make it a bit more
streamlined
across the pages but stopped after a while for two reasons: 1) it was
bigger work than I expected and 2) the community seemed uninterested
in
the
component as you can observe in our discussion in this JIRA for
example:
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-5070
To make it reach its potential, there are multiple things to do of
which
I did some partially:
- Create a BIRT library (filename.rptlibrary) which hold references to
javascript source files, CSS files, etc .. and it contains all the
assets
(logo, fonts, colors, you name it) so that you have a unified look and
feel
and unified data preparation scripts for all reports
- Create CSS files unifying the look and feel of all reports
- Create javascript files that contain scripts for repeating tasks
(library imports, UI label preparation, report layout, parameter
import
and
validation, exception handling etc ...)
- Create sub-libraries that handle business intelligence requirements.
For example, you can prepare common cubes on the main entities of the
system (Party, Product, OrderHeader, Accounting Transaction, etc ...)
- Finally, once the above is in place, then you can design a whole
heap
of reports, OLAP cupes, Charts, you name it!
The question remains, is the community interested in adopting BIRT as
its
reporting tool? If not, then renaming it would not make much sense
given
the effort put into fixing all the links to the component and anything
else
that might break from the rename.
My 2 cents!
Cheers
Taher Alkhateeb
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ron Wheeler" <rwhee...@artifact-software.com>
To: dev@ofbiz.apache.org
Sent: Thursday, 26 February, 2015 6:01:09 PM
Subject: Re: [PROPOSAL] Change name of birt component
You think that it might be more aspirational than real?
http://bod-wiki.birtondemand.com/wiki/index.php?title=App_Mashboard
is
the kind of thing that I expect OFBiz to support one day.
Perhaps a more ambitious name might encourage someone to take an
interest in enhancing the capabilities.
"BIRT" is just the name of a tool and gives no idea about what
functionality is possible.
"Reports" seems to understate what BIRT can do.
I am not sure of the work required to enhance the existing interface
to
produce more of what BIRT can do OOTB but it seems to be something
pretty easy
http://www.theserverside.com/news/1364376/Using-Eclipse-
BIRT-Report-Libraries-and-Templates
Ron
On 26/02/2015 9:19 AM, Jacopo Cappellato wrote:
My main concern is that assigning a generic name (such as "reports"
or
"analytics") to a component that is just one very specific way (and
in
some
ways limited/questionable for the way the Birt has been integrated)
to
implement an integration with a reporting tool may be misleading.
Jacopo
On Feb 26, 2015, at 12:46 AM, Pierre Smits <pierre.sm...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Hi all,
Currently, all component names describe - in one word - what the
components
are about and what kind of functionality the user - from a business
point
of view - can expect. As examples: accounting is related to the
various
accounting (financial, gl, invoicing, payment, , etc) functions and
services, and projectmgr is related to program and project
management,
project task assignment and time registration.
The birt component is a bit the odd one out. The name doesn't say in
that
one word what it delivers. In stead it is an acronym for a specific
third
party integration solution and another open source project with the
same
name (birt, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project ). One
could
even say it is the name of a tool, not the name of a business
functionality.
In order to be able to increase awareness of the multitude of
business
functionalities (as could be done by using the name of the
components)
and
improve adoption, I suggest to change the name (and the references
to
it in
the component and others) to something that is more to the point
business
wise.
I propose we rename it to 'reports'.
What do you think?
Best regards,
Pierre Smits
*ORRTIZ.COM <http://www.orrtiz.com>*
Services & Solutions for Cloud-
Based Manufacturing, Professional
Services and Retail & Trade
http://www.orrtiz.com
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwhee...@artifact-software.com
skype: ronaldmwheeler
phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102
