Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced General Availability of Pentaho’s new Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) capabilities enabling developers to create highly scalable, visually rich interactive web-based BI applications based on Pentaho’s framework. The updated library, complete with documentation, is available for download immediately at http://www.pentaho.org/download/ga.php .
The new AJAX toolkit is a fully-tested and documented version of the technology that was used to develop the Pentaho/Google Maps integration released in October 2006. A short demonstration video that illustrates the use of Pentaho AJAX for building location intelligence applications with Google Maps is available at www.pentaho.com/products/demos/ .
Pentaho AJAX leverages the capabilities of AJAX technologies to allow development of highly interactive, lightweight BI applications that increase speed and responsiveness for end users by providing a thin-client interface as well as minimizing browser refreshes and round trips to the server. Critical data is cached in the browser using HTML and XML, and JavaScript techniques are used to alter the user interface without re-drawing the page or requesting additional data from the database.
The breadth of the Pentaho Open BI Suite makes it possible for developers to use the new AJAX library to build Pentaho-based reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration applications for standalone use or for embedding in existing enterprise applications. The new capabilities can be used to trigger data integration jobs, schedule weekly emails, build MDX queries, and more.
In addition, Pentaho AJAX can simplify integration of Pentaho’s BI modules with other applications by offering the flexibility to integrate applications interactively on the client-side. In many cases, this approach is simpler, faster, and better-performing than complex server-side integrations. For organizations that use heterogeneous web application environments employing different technologies such as Java, Microsoft .NET, Php, and CGI, Pentaho AJAX enables simplified and more flexible operational BI integration to improve frontline decision-making for operational employees.
“Pentaho AJAX opens up tremendous possibilities for rich, interactive, thin-client interfaces to Pentaho,” said James Dixon, CTO of Pentaho. “Pentaho’s architecture was designed to easily enable new interfaces like this, and our lack of a legacy technology platform allows us to bring these capabilities to users more quickly than traditional proprietary platforms.”