All ideas on this page assume Java programming skills except where noted.

Pentaho Platform

Google maps AJAX component - AVAILABLE

• Create a Pentaho plug-in component to display BI data using the Google Maps API.
• Support drill linking
• Action Sequence XML interface to the plug-in
• Design Studio details page to support the plug in
• Add AJAX support for displaying data

Mentor: James Dixon

JBoss Rules (Drools) component - TAKEN

• Create a Pentaho plug-in component to integrate with the JBoss Rules Engine and API.
• Support passing data between Pentaho BI Platform and the Rules Engine
• Action Sequence XML interface to the plug-in
• Design Studio details page to support the plug in
• Integrate the Drools Eclipse IDE into Design Studio

The architecture of the BI Server is component based. We interface with other applications through this component interface. It allows us to script (we call it an Action Sequence) a business process that can interface with external systems and solve problems. For example - the SQL Component can perform a query against a Database, loop through the results, do some business logic which detects exceptions and then take some action like email a report to the responsible person. A Jboss Rules component would be our interface to the Jboss Rules engine and could be used to do that business logic. Here is a link to the "Component Writers Guide" which more fully explains what is involved.

PentahoDoc:Building Components

The Component API is very small and creating a component is easy. What we lack is the Jboss Rules expertise to implement the component. Someone who knows the Jboss Rules API and architecture should have little trouble with the task.

Other things to consider: How do we deploy the Jboss Rules engine? How do we configure the BI Platform to use an existing engine? Beyond the component, we have a design tool for creating Action Sequences. It should be modified to have a GUI for configuring the Jboss Rules Component.

Mentor: James Dixon

PHP integration - AVAILABLE

Enhance the component UI layer to support presentation and navigation within a PHP framework.  Create a navigator similar to the current PCI to demonstrate the PHP capabilities.

Mentor: James Dixon

Pentaho Analysis

Halogen - Web based OLAP viewer - AVAILABLE

Project halogen is an olap4j based cube slicer/dicer visualizer written in gwt.

Home Page:
http://code.google.com/p/halogen/

Implement features from the Project Halogen backlog.
http://code.google.com/p/halogen/wiki/HalogenBacklog

Mentor: William Seyler

Pentaho Reporting

Implement LibFormat - AVAILABLE

Implement a OpenOffice compatible data-format library. OpenOffice uses
an extended formatting model, that is slightly incompatible to the
standard java ones. Their model has slightly more abilities and is a
requirement for OpenOffice and Excel export.

(At the moment, we simply use the Java Formatter classes, and hope that
these beasts are compatible enough. This covers 90% of all cases, but it
is no perfect solution.)

Mentor: Thomas Morgner

LibFormula Enhancements - AVAILABLE

Formula editor

A formula editor that makes it easy for users to enter complex formulas.
This is the same as the various Excel/OO-Calc formula wizards.

Implement More Formulas

Add all formula functions that are needed to become OpenFormula Level 1
or Level 2 compatible.

Mentor: Thomas Morgner

LibFonts Enhancements - AVAILABLE

Complete the TTF-handling

Implement the font-metrics computation for TrueType fonts.

Add Type1 & Type3 Font support

LibFonts cannot read these font files at the moment, so that we have to
fall back to the much slower JDK and/or iText for these fonts. That also
prevents us from reading all available font metrics, which makes layouting
more inaccurate.

Pentaho Reporting Classic-Engine - TAKEN

• Add SWT-GUIs and SWT printing
• Table-Of-Contents support
• PDF-Outline support

This aligns the classic engine's elements with the properties the
report-designer exposes. Eventually this will allow us to process
the report-designer's *.report files directly. Manual exports are
inefficient. It may have been reasonable as long as the designer was
meant to be used for more than one reporting engine, but as the
designer's only target is (and I guess: will be) the Classic-Engine,
we should try to overcome this annoying step.

• Create a Web-Viewer for HTML and PDF reports

The Web-Viewer provides means to parametrize and display reports
in a web-browser. The viewer allows paginated content and therefore
the user can browse the report much easier than by generating the
single huge file.

Like all other preview-components, this viewer should allow the user
to save the report in all available export-formats.

Mentor: Thomas Morgner

Pentaho Reporting Flow-Engine - AVAILABLE

• Add report processing layers

The engine is flexible enough to allow the emulation of other
reporting engines. Implement a parser and where needed the required
layout controller for the following report file formats:

• BIRT-Report
• MS-Reporting
• CrystalReports
• JasperReports
• DataVision

Pentaho Metadata

Add Publishing of OLAP Models to Pentaho's BI Platform - AVAILABLE

Add the ability to publish metadata based OLAP views automatically to Pentaho's BI Platform. This would involve extending the existing Metadata Editor Publish functionality.

Add string functions to Metadata's open formula API - AVAILABLE

Pentaho Metadata uses Open Formula to represent platform independent SQL conditions and formulas. This task involves implementing general string functions, such as substring, length, trim, etc, in the open formula to SQL dialect engine within Metadata's MQLQuery architecture. See Pentaho Metadata Formulas for more information on formulas.

Enhance MQL Query Editor - AVAILABLE

This task involves adding free form constraint editing to MQL Query Editor and converting MQL Query Editor from SWT to Pentaho's new XUL UI Framework. By converting this dialog to Pentaho's XUL framework, the dialog can run within both SWT and Swing environments, and has the potential to run in a Web environment once the Web XUL UI Framework layer is implemented.

Mentor: Will Gorman

Pentaho Common Code

Expose new common data source config dialog in all tools - AVAILABLE

Take the PDI (Kettle) database connection dialog which was rewritten using a reusable XUL based UI framework and implement it is some or all of the other Pentaho applications.

Apps that could possibly use the new database connection framework:

Report Designer (Swing)
RDW (SWT)
Kettle (JFace\SWT)
Management Services (HTML)
Schema Designer (Swing)

Tasks:

• Use XUL definitions for the dialogs that were re-designed
• Creat the widget renderers for each of the client tool technologies (This should require a common repository for XUL - to - x- technology)
• Mapping the renderers to the XUL definition

Mentor: Gretchen Moran

Pentaho Data Mining

Clustering and Naive Bayes Visualization - AVAILABLE

Provide a graphical visualization for the results of clustering (and potentially a naive Bayes model). The visualization would have one row per cluster, where each row displays either histograms (for numeric variables) or pie charts (for discrete variables) showing distributions over the whole data and within cluster/class distributions superimposed over the top. The tool should allow the user to specify the order of the rows (i.e. large clusters/classes at the top) and the order of the variables (i.e. perhaps ordered by importance to the clustering/predictive model).

Other machine learning/data mining projects - AVAILABLE

Any projects that have a tangible outcome with respect to the Weka code-base will be considered (e.g. new ideas for classifiers, clusterers, etc. or stuff from the literature that isn't in Weka yet).

Some possibilities:

• Implement the BIRCH clustering method of Zang, Ramakrishnan and Livney
• Implement a fast association rules learner based on FP-growth/FP-tree.

Mentor: Mark Hall