Stepping into Open Source

Just before Christmas I took a course "Building Analytical Solutions with Pentaho" (If you haven't heard of Pentaho it's an open source Business Intelligence Suite). Of particular importance to the clients of the company I work for are the ETL and Reporting tools.

While I was a little disappointed in the class itself the suite of tools are quite impressive, what makes it even more interesting is the fact that it's opens source and free (They do have a variety of support options available).

Yesterday I started an integration exercise. Since the entire Pentaho suite is built with Java the question is how easy/difficult will it be to integrate the reporting engine into an existing Coldfusion Application, specifically the self service reporting.

This is going to prove to be an interesting learning experience for sure