This is Meta. Meta is the newest player in the Classic-Engine team.
Meta is a little bit shy, as Meta is the new member in the Engine-team.
For a very long time, the Class-Engine team consisted entirely of Workers, Handlers and Factories. These guys tend to be a bit rough. You really have to know how to approach them. If you call them in the wrong way, they outright laugh at you, sometimes they even start to go totally crazy and produce garbage.
But workers are not very communicative. Entering the factory, looking around and asking loudly what happens when you push that shiny red button does not make you many friends there. To outsiders, the workers tend to be a bit cold. They know how to talk to each other and how to get the job done, that’s sure. But introduce them to a new idea, and they may as well it you with their heavy tools.
Meta, on the other hand, is very communicative. Ask Meta something, and you will get a whole lecture with all the necessary (and most of the time also all the unnecessary) details. Whenever Meta enters a new place, Meta opens up the notebook and starts to collect all information available.
Meta is also open to outsiders. It is not hard to get in touch with Meta – just ask. Meta happily tells you what every worker does, how you best approach a certain worker or handler. Meta even knows what you must feed into a factory to get a certain product out.
Meta can be a great help to everyone who want to talk to the Classic-Engine team.
(But here’s a little secret: Meta does not want to do any real work. Yeah, Meta talks a lot about how great everything works together, but don’t ask Meta to produce something for you. Meta introspects, Meta knows, but Meta does not touch the dirty machinery.)
If you want to visit Meta and chat with it about the Elements, Attributes, Styles or Expressions, come visit Meta in the package “org.jfree.report.metadata” on the Classic-Engine Trunk-Branch in the Pentaho SVN repository.
And if it happens that you know a design tool or report-definition generator, introduce them to Meta. Meta always loves to make new friends.