The CGG plugin does a nice job, trouble is: It is vendor locked-in. Lets see whether we can change that.

Years ago the smart guys at Web-Details started to use Protovis to create modern charts for their Dashboards in a project called CCC (Community Chart Components). Inevitably, these charts need to be printed from time to time, so shortly after that they created the CGG-plugin for the Pentaho BI-Server to do that.

I like the Bi-Server. I also like printing. But I don’t like having to have a server running to get my charts as images into a report. So a few weeks ago, I took the CGG plugin and pruned everything that relates to BI-Server specific code. Refactored. Sliced it a bit. As a result, we now have LibCGG, readily available on GitHub.

What is LibCGG

LibCGG is an abstract layer to render CCC/Protovis charts. Its only focus is rendering. It takes the relevant javascript that makes up the charts and produces SVG or PNG output. LibCGG comes with some JUnit test-cases showing that simple samples provided by Web-Details actually run. None of these samples have been modified in any way, they just run.

What is it NOT

LibCGG does not deal with data-sources. It does provide an interface that can be implemented, but it does not come with data-sources itself.
LibCGG does not deal with HTTP requests or even the format in which charts may or may not be stored, defined or delivered to users. It is up to the actual implementation to deal with that. I have modified a version of CGG to use LibCGG as a prove of concept. After all, we dont want to loose functionality, don’t we?

What do we need to use LibCGG in the reporting engine?

At the moment, I have not written any glue code to connect LibCGG with the reporting engine. Ultimately, this will happen though – why else would I care to separate CGG from the server? The barriers are surprisingly low. Pentaho Reporting already handles SVG data, and thus LibCGG needs just a thin wrapper around an existing element for a first show-off.

After that, we will need a chart editor. Pedro assured me that CCC charts come with enough metadata to make it easy to get a basic one up and running quickly. Once we have that, I am sure our UI team will want to come in to make that experience less geeky.

And last but not least: We need to separate CCC from CDA (Community Data Access) a bit. At the moment, there is a silent assumption that CCC charts exclusively communicate with a CDA datasource. It should not be too hard to reroute those calls to directly go to the report’s declared data-sources instead.

And now: The one million dollar question: When .. will it be ready?

With a bit of week-end magic, how about May? April should (hopefully) see us get feature complete on the committed features for Pentaho Reporting 4.0, so there is plenty of time for some Ninja coding. I even have a designated place for it: The ‘extensions-charting’ module, which was reserved for Pentaho’s next-generation charting that never really made it. CCC – be welcome, and never mind the ghosts of past visualizations.