Wednesday, February 06, 2008

A nice little OLAP viewer

Bill Seyler and Will Gorman from Pentaho have put together a nice little OLAP viewer in their spare time, called Halogen. It isn't fully baked (by a long stretch) but it shows what you can do if you pair up GWT with olap4j.

Halogen viewer I think it shows off the strengths of both GWT and olap4j nicely. Both technologies have a strong portability message. Because of GWT, Halogen has really nice AJAX usability and can run in any browser. Because of olap4j, it can run against mondrian and an XMLA provider without changing a line of code. (I haven't tried it against against Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services, for instance, but it shouldn't be hard to get it working.)

This isn't an official Pentaho product, more of a proof of concept with the potential to grow into an alternative to JPivot if the community thinks it is cool and we get some momentum behind it. To make it easier for people to contribute, we made a point of releasing it under the commercial-friendly license, namely the Mozilla Public License.

Check it out.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Julian,

Can u recommend a Mondrian expert?

I am looking for someone who can implement Mondrian in my system.

Thanks,
J

Julian Hyde said...

Contact Pentaho and they should be able to hook you up with one of their partner consulting companies.

Julian

Vincent Teyssier said...

Hi Julian,

I used Mondrian / JPivot / Kettle last year for a full open source BI project (the biggest hotels company in the world).
I would have appreciated to use this OLAP viewer at this time, to spare some time !
Now I'm trying to bring Pentaho in a call center industry.
Please, do it ! We need it !

vteyssier@decisionsystems-studio.fr

Anonymous said...

Hi Julian,

This viewer seems a joke to me. A good opensource olap viewer is a must right now, and this viewer is not even a toy. Halogen project has been dead for months. For instance, is olap4j dying? I don't find any reference on google, no activity, just a homepage without updates for months...
I think Mondrian is the nicest part of Pentaho but as Pentaho is dead, Mondrian will follow if you dont do something... :S

Best Regards