Extract the brains of all reporting and charting developers, put them in a large blender, turn it on, wait, turn the blender off, and fill the brains back into their original containers to extract the new ideas. Repeat this process as often as needed.

The last two weeks were by all accounts insane. It all started very innocent, with a call to fly over to Orlando to bring the features of version 0.8.10 to the people of Pentaho.

The scenery was well set up. The charting team finished the first major step of the new charting engine, so that we now have a solid and well-laid out fundament for generating charts. Mike created Mantle, a new UI for the Pentaho Platform. Finally the solid infrastructural backend the platform provides becomes a face that is appropriate in the wake of the 21st century. Using Mantle instead of the old UI feels like driving a Ferrari vs. a horse chariot. You have to see it, feel it! In the meantime, the Reporting-Ease-Of-Use sprints were still on their way, changing the Report-Designer from a developer-centric tool into a by far more business user friendly designer.
The two weeks were filled with dialogs like this: ‘Look, thats one of the new things we put into [project]!’ – ‘Hey, I could use that in [Project] to do do [mind boggling feature].’ – ‘Wait, when you do that, I could use that to do [feature] over here.’.

So what did we create?

• Mantle no longer needs a explicit XAction to run reports stored in the new unified fileformat. As long as your report does not require complex preprocessing or uses bursting, you no longer need to write and maintain a separate XAction.
• Mantle now provides a Pageable HTML preview for the reports of the platform.
• The engine now has a clean and controlled way of defining parameters. The report definition contains all information needed to build the most marvelous UIs on top of it. Which brings us to:
• Mantle can parametrize reports and generates a sensible, fully and easily customizable (without using XSLT! I cant bear that stuff!) parameter UI.
• The new Charting System now becomes integrated into the Classic-Engine. (For now, this support will be called experimental, as we need the freedom to twist the code and XMLs whenever we feel the need for it.)
• The Interactivity-Extensions blew away the innocent (and also the not so innocent, of course) bystanders. The ability to inject any HTML/Script code into the resulting HTML files now allows a whole class of new reports. The Swing-UI allows similar features.
• The Report-Designer now comes with a fully featured formula-editor, that makes Office-(Open and MS alike)-users feel at home.
• We all agreed (with full heart) that SWT is a big WTF and should not have been born in the first place. SWT brings the insanity of low-level APIs combined with the inability to provide sensible platform independence (the main argument for running Java!). Swing is our future here!

After these two weeks, I really have to wonder: If we, with just a few developers, are able to drive development so fast, why do Monster-companies like Business Objects, Cognos and so on (with thousands of employees) appear nowadays nothing more than sitting ducks for targeting practice. Not that I would complain about it, as 65 million years ago, swift and agile critters already out-paced slow and huge adversaries. Let’s repeat that game ..