Background

I initially got in touch with Open Source BI while managing a Pentaho deployment (previously I was involved in another project using SAP BI). So when I faced the development of a small utility requiring BI functionallity, I choose to use some of the foundations of this BI suite. Specifically Mondrian as the OLAP engine and JPivot for data visualization.

While Mondrian seemed very easy to integrate, JPivot was quite more cumbersome and unwieldy so I started looking for alternatives. I was experimenting with version 2.0 of JSF, at that moment, so I tried to find a JSF components library to provide JPivot like functionality.

I could not find it, and the utility development was finally cancelled.

Anyway, personally, the idea of such a component library seemed appealing, and was a nice path to learn about JSF custom components development. For me, the finall push was the release of version 1.0 of olap4j.

The vision of a suite of BI presentation-tier components, pluggable to several OLAP providers using an standarized interface (olap4j), and tha could be integrated into an also standard Web framework (JSF 2.0), by just dropping a .jar file into the project's classpath attracted me more and more.