Actuate s BIRT ihub 3

Transcription

1 Actuate s BIRT ihub 3 Technical Summary of New Features Actuate s BIRT ihub 3 provides a highly scalable solution that enhances your brand experience via applications that deliver personalized insights to your customers, partners, and employees. This release enhances the productivity of developers and enables them to easily build and deploy secure, visually appealing applications for large user populations. By expanding the universe of Big Data sources accessible from BIRT, BIRT ihub 3 unlocks and makes available additional personalized insights to end users. BIRT ihub 3 empowers system administrators by providing them with a unified set of tools to monitor, manage and administer all Actuate services that are deployed on the BIRT ihub platform.

2 Notice The information in this white paper is proprietary to Actuate Corporation ( Actuate ) and may not be used in any form without the prior consent of Actuate. Copyright 2013 Actuate Corporation. All rights reserved. Actuate, BIRT ihub, BIRT Analytics, BIRT ondemand, BIRT Content Services, and the Actuate logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Actuate Corporation and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and certain other countries. The use of the word partner or partnership does not imply a legal partnership relationship between Actuate and any other company. All other brands, names or trademarks mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners. December 2013 Actuate Corporation 951 Mariner s Island Blvd San Mateo, CA Tel: (888)

3 Table of Contents Notice... 2 Introduction... 4 Simplified, Unified and Consistent User Experience... 5 Visualizations and Interactivity... 6 New HTML5 Visualization Capabilities... 6 New Dashboard Capabilities... 9 New Capabilities for Mobile Devices...10 New PDF Accessibility Capabilities...10 Developer Productivity and Power...11 Unified Data Layer with New Generation of BIRT Data Objects (BDOs)...11 Improvements in Application Development Experience...13 Open Source BIRT 4.3 Support...14 Data Connectivity...15 Simplified Access to Microsoft Excel as a Data Source...15 Access to More Big Data Sources...15 Unified Deployment and Management Platform Increases IT Efficiency...16 Improved IT Efficiency...16 Enhanced Security...18 Faster Time to Value...18 Installation, Upgrades, and Migration...19 SPM Updates

4 Introduction Actuate s BIRT ihub 3 simplifies the delivery of personalized analytics and insights via a single platform that integrates BIRT based, visually appealing, interactive application services, predictive analytics services, and customer content services. This release also enhances the productivity of the application developer and the administrator in efficiently building applications that leverage traditional and Big Data sources to serve personalized insights securely to millions of end users, on any device at any time. The BIRT ihub 3 release features the following: Enhanced User Experience via Data Visualizations and Presentation HTML5 based data visualizations that support any data source and any device Appealing visualizations by default New Android phone app for consuming BIRT content Rich, modern interface that provides a new, simplified, and consistent user experience Enhanced Developer Productivity and Broader Data Access Faster time to market via reduced time to develop and deploy applications New BIRT Data Model that simplifies BIRT meta data management Access to more Big Data sources and Excel data Mac OS and Windows 64 bit developer tools Enable easy migration from open source BIRT to commercial features Improved IT Efficiency via a Unified Deployment Platform Centralized system management Quick installation and configuration New built-in monitoring and utilization system Simplified management for all styles of deployment including SaaS or on-premise The new capabilities in BIRT ihub 3 are detailed in the rest of this document. 4

5 Simplified, Unified and Consistent User Experience With BIRT ihub 3, Actuate has put user experience at the forefront of product design. The new UI delivers a consistent, modern, user experience, making it easier for new users to get started and for all users to create great looking applications. The new UI is focused around several key productivity enhancing design principles, delivering a user experience that is: Simple: Removes extraneous objects, colors, and other visual elements that might distract users from their tasks or that might come across as noise in a finished product. Modern: Updates the design so that its interface, architecture, and other parts of the user s experience feel contemporary and fresh. Elegant: Recognizes that form is as important as function in crafting an experience with a design vocabulary and style that is sleek, sophisticated, and appealing. Focused: Ensures that data, data stories and visualization of the content takes center stage, while allowing application elements (fit and finish) to take a visual back seat, while still remaining powerful and effective. Intuitive: Craft solutions that take advantage of a user s prior experience and expectations to eliminate confusion, frustration, or long learning curves. The new UI and design principles permeate through the following Actuate User interfaces, including: My Files Dashboards Interactive Viewer Report Studio Metrics Manager Figure 1: New UI - My Files Page 5

6 Visualizations and Interactivity BIRT ihub 3 provides a range of visualizations that enable the compelling and interactive display of information to users. With ihub 3, HTML5 technology is used to deliver visualizations, ensuring support across a variety of platforms such as desktops, laptops, and touch devices including mobile devices. New HTML5 Visualization Capabilities In BIRT ihub 3 Actuate has provided additional HTML5 visualizations for charts, gadgets, and maps. All out-of-the-box charts, gadgets and maps support HTML5 as their primary output format. Maps Many applications contain a wealth of geospatial data that is difficult for users to understand in text form. To address this challenge, BIRT ihub 3 includes more than two hundred US and international maps for visualizing geospatial information. These built in maps leverage HTML5 technology and come with an easy to use map builder interface. With this new capability, the BIRT developer can use the map builder interface to create custom display of the data to different locations on the map, customize its look and feel, enable interactivity and create highlights on the data. Using JavaScript, the BIRT developer can also customize these visualizations with custom presentation and interactivity options such as the addition of annotations, animations, and custom drawings to meet specific application needs. Figure 2: New HTML5 Map Builder 6

7 Figure 3: Creating Highlights on Mapped Data Charts In BIRT ihub 3 all BIRT native charts such as Scatter, Radar, Gantt, Stock, Bubble and others support HTML5 as their primary output format. Features such as animations, interactivity, advanced customization with JavaScript and themes are also available with these charts. Figure 4: HTML5 Representation of a Gantt Chart Timeline charts Timeline charts, such as stock charts, have been enhanced to provide fast zooming options such as a timeline range selector, scrollbar and a timeline bottom slider. These options are especially useful when navigating a large dataset that includes the time dimension such as for hourly or daily stock values over several years. 7

8 The timeline range selector enables the user to quickly zoom in on a pre-selected time range or manually select a custom time range for better insight. For example, in Figure 5 below, the user can quickly zoom in to pre-selected ranges for 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, year-to-date (YTD), 1 year. The timeline bottom slider enables the user to create a visual navigator window over the area of interest by dragging the edges of the window. The scrollbar enables the user to select a suitable zoom level for the data and then scroll across the entire timeline. Figure 5: New Stock Chart with Options to Filter Data by Time Gadgets Gadgets such as Meter, Cylinder, Linear Gauge, Spark Line, Bullet and Thermometer gadgets, have been enhanced to provide HTML5 as their primary output format. These HTML5 gadgets provide a rich user experience with out-of-the-box animation effects and interactivity. The following HTML5 gadgets are available: Figure 6: Gadgets Available in BIRT ihub 3 Existing BIRT content with Flash based visualizations are still supported. However, the new content leverages new HTML5 visualizations by default. 8

9 New Dashboard Capabilities The BIRT ihub 3 dashboard offering has been enhanced to create an enriched interactive experience. It also includes additional functionality for pre-built visualizations and other components to increase developer productivity and collaboration between developers and end users. Apply Button Gadget in a Dashboard When a user clicks on a selector in a dashboard, the gadgets in the dashboard that depend on that selector are refreshed immediately. This is the preferred interaction in most cases although in some cases, particularly when there are multiple selectors, it may be more desirable to delay the refresh until the user has completed all their selections. BIRT ihub 3 provides flexibility here by using a new Apply Button gadget, which acts as a switch. The dependent gadgets are refreshed only when the Apply button is clicked. This enhances the user s experience and optimizes system performance. Add Components from BIRT Library to a Dashboard In the construction of a dashboard, end users can use components that have been pre-built by developers and provided in a BIRT library that sources data from a BIRT data object. This helps in increasing developer productivity through the reuse of pre-built, complex visualizations; branding themes; and other components for use in the creation of dashboards. The BIRT library can contain both visualizations and themes. This functionality also enhances the collaboration capabilities between end users and BIRT development teams by enabling end users to reuse components stored in BIRT Libraries. Figure 7: Using a BIRT Library in Constructing a Dashboard 9

10 New Capabilities for Mobile Devices With BIRT ihub 3, new HTML5 based visualizations are also supported on mobile devices. The following devices are supported: Apple iphone Apple ipad Android Tablets Android Phones (new in BIRT ihub 3) New BIRT Viewer for Mobile Devices BIRT ihub 3 includes new versions of BIRT Viewer for ios and Android that allow users to view content from BIRT ihub on their mobile devices (phones and tablets, etc.). Specifically, there is a new dedicated mobile viewer application for Android phones. The Android mobile viewer applications are supported on Android and up on phones and Android 3 on tablets. New PDF Accessibility Capabilities In BIRT ihub 3 Actuate has extended multiple-output delivery by giving the BIRT developer the ability to enter accessibility tags to BIRT report designs to produce accessible PDFs that conform to the PDF/UA specification (ISO 14289) and achieve WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliance. With this new capability, BIRT developers can define the way the generated PDF document will be read aloud by assistive technology. Once created, BIRT Developers can publish their report designs to the BIRT ihub and leverage the Accessible PDF for BIRT ihub feature for High Volume Transactional Output (HVTO). This is only available if an Accessible PDF license has been purchased separately via ihub licensing. To enable accessibility tagging in BIRT Designer Pro, the BIRT developer will need to set the report property Accessible PDF to true which can be set by going into the Advanced Properties tab. The accessibility features of BIRT Designer Professional can be used to customize the behavior of specific objects. For example, you can specify alternate text for individual objects that an accessibility tool reads instead of the text contained in the object. The BIRT developer can also provide alternate text for objects, such as images, so the customer is provided with a description of the object. The user has the flexibility to set the report language at the report level and modify language at the specific object/ report item level. 10

11 Developer Productivity and Power With BIRT ihub 3, Actuate has simplified the construction and use of the data layer, and also dramatically improved performance for analytic workloads. Unified Data Layer with New Generation of BIRT Data Objects (BDOs) Prior to availability of BIRT ihub 3, developers sometimes faced confusing choices between multiple overlapping data layers. If the requirement was for run-time operational access to source data and data federation, Information Objects (IOs) were the more appropriate choice. However, if the requirement also included the delivery of analytic information into a dashboard, then BIRT Data Objects were also needed. If the primary use case was analysis of data in an analytic data store then BDOs were the more appropriate choice. It sometimes became difficult to decide whether to use BDOs or IOs, and some solutions ended up requiring both. With BIRT ihub 3, Actuate has simplified these choices by extending BDOs to handle use cases that IOs support. Developers no longer have to choose in the vast majority of use cases the new BDOs are the better choice. Information Objects are still supported, however; with the availability of BIRT ihub 3, Actuate s best practice recommendation is to now use BDOs. A unified data layer provides tremendous productivity benefits for developers who no longer need to map business requirements to two separate technologies and at the same time consider the corner cases related to separate technologies. Consolidation also eliminates the need for learning the mechanics of two different data management layers, with different user experiences. IO features that have been added to BDOs include: Performance optimizations for real-time, direct source access - push-down on joins, filters, sorts and others Query trimming on tables and columns Re-synchronizing of metadata to underlying changes Grouping / Organization / Custom ordering of fields in the UI New features include: Push-down of joins to ODAs, so that joins occur as close to the data as possible Blazingly fast performance for analytic operations The following features of IOs are not supported in BIRT ihub 3: Left outer joins Impact analysis Multilayer grouping of columns (nested categories) 11

12 Extensions to the BDO Construction Process BDOs have been extended to include a new data structure called BIRT Data Model (BDM). BDM s reside alongside Data Cubes. The construction of BDM s follows a familiar pattern by leveraging the same steps used for building a BDO, with just a few additional steps. BDM s are defined in a mapping screen using drag and drop operations to establish relationships between tables. Automated column matching is available as a shortcut, in cases where the column names on which to relate tables are the same. Figure 8: BIRT Data Models Within BIRT Data Objects BDM Consumption Once created, BDM s can be used within the BIRT ihub Visualization Suite. The fields appear in their categories when the user selects data for their visualizations, as shown in Report Studio below: Figure 9: Using BDM s in Report Studio 12

13 Support for High-Volume Data BIRT ihub 3 delivers substantial performance gains with BDM s. The new data architecture implements a dictionary that enables smaller representation of large-size values. Further, data is compressed using the Run Length Encoding (RLE) technique. The compression ratio achieved through RLE is heavily dependent on the degree to which data values are repeated. Performance Gains in BDM s Significant performance gains are realized in BIRT ihub 3 using a number of techniques to maximize the amount of data that is stored in memory. The data remains compressed in memory, and queries are executed directly on compressed data. Only the necessary columns are loaded for each query, and columns can be re-used across queries. Also, query components, such as calculations, can be re-used in different queries. The queries are executed directly on compressed data, further increasing the volume of data that can be retained in memory. The data is materialized much faster with BDM than with cubes. Only the columns that are used are materialized, and the data representation is column based. Improvements in Application Development Experience Enhanced File Publishing A simpler way to publish the contents of a project has been introduced in BIRT ihub 3. With this mechanism all of the contents of a project published to the ihub are placed into a folder under /Applications. Figure 10: Project Publishing You can still choose to upload individual files as before. This mechanism is available under the Advanced Publish tab of the File Publish dialog in the Publish Files menu. Support for Embedding HTML5 Code in Designs In BIRT ihub 3 Actuate has enhanced support for including/embedding HTML5 content in BIRT reports/designs. In particular, Actuate has improved the options for the BIRT developer to embed HTML5 tags in a BIRT design via HTML text item. This allows the developer to take advantage of advanced HTML5 capabilities. 13

14 Designing Dashboards in BIRT Designer Pro In BIRT ihub 3, BIRT developers can now create a dashboard using BIRT Designer Pro. This functionality allows a BIRT developer to create and package dashboards as part of a project, and then publish it to ihub. Developers do not need to change tools for dashboard development. While creating a dashboard from BIRT Designer Pro, the BIRT developer is able to source the data from BIRT data objects. BIRT libraries can now be used in dashboards. Dashboards can be managed and packaged as part of a project. Now, the BIRT developer has a single development tool for developing any BIRT content. It also allows standalone dashboard development and offline viewing. Figure 11: Authoring a Dashboard from BD Pro Existing web-based dashboard authoring continues to be supported. Open Source BIRT 4.3 Support The Actuate technology and products are rooted in the BIRT Open Source Project, which is a top level project under the Eclipse Foundation, one of the leading open source community groups. As such the BIRT project is aligned with the Eclipse major releases, of which Kepler is the latest. BIRT ihub 3 is updated for engine compatibility with the latest Eclipse OS 4.3.x release. Similarly, the user experience of the BIRT Designer Professional authoring tool has been aligned with the latest developments of the Eclipse 4.3.x look and feel. There are more than 2.5 million BIRT open source developers as of this writing. With these updates to BIRT ihub 3, it is even easier for non-commercial BIRT OS projects to transition to full commercial deployments for scalability, manageability, security, and ease of maintenance. 14

15 Data Connectivity Simplified Access to Microsoft Excel as a Data Source In many organizations, modest volumes of data may live in Excel spreadsheets. Often, line of business and departmental users create data in spreadsheets because spreadsheets are in their comfort zone, and they are able to get quick answers to very simple questions. However, spreadsheet proliferation creates a larger and more critical data integration problem when the spreadsheet data is needed as part of a broader managed enterprise reporting environment, particularly with the trend toward Big Data projects. To facilitate rapid inclusion of Excel data into enterprise applications, Actuate has streamlined the import of Excel data in BIRT ihub 3. Users can import Excel data directly from a BIRT design and pick the required fields from a builder UI. A BDO corresponding to the Excel source is automatically set up, including the data source, data set, and data model associated with the Excel data. This streamlined approach collapses multiple steps down to a single import. Figure 12: Streamlined Import of Excel Data Access to More Big Data Sources With the release of BIRT ihub 3, Actuate is continuing to broaden the supported data sources in BIRT. Developers can access more data, including Big Data sources such as: Apache Hbase via Hive Apache Cassandra MongoDB Cloudera Hadoop and Cloudera Impala These data sources represent some of the most popular Big Data repositories. They can quickly ingest large volumes of data, and as such they are being used to store petabytes of streaming as well as static data. By combining any of these repositories with BIRT ihub 3 developers achieve end-to-end scalability and security. Data scalability is provided by these Big Data sources, while ihub 3 provides matching scalability and security in the delivery of reporting and analytics applications to very large and diverse user populations. 15

16 Unified Deployment and Management Platform Increases IT Efficiency BIRT ihub 3 is a unified deployment and management platform that offers a tremendous boost in productivity for IT by delivering re-usable, pre-integrated, out-of-the-box services. BIRT ihub 3 brings together all of the application management and distribution services. Now, the previously separate platforms (BIRT Visualization Platform, BIRT Analytics, and BIRT Content Services) can be managed from a single platform. With BIRT ihub 3, Actuate s unified platform provides the following benefits: Improved IT efficiency Enhanced security Faster time to value Improved IT Efficiency Actuate s deployment platform is unified via a shared services layer that is integrated into the various Actuate services such as BIRT Visualization Platform, BIRT Content Services, BIRT Analytics, and Metrics Management services. These services share one single platform to manage users, and provide single sign-on, system provisioning, log management and more. Multitier Centralized/De-centralized System Management BIRT ihub 3 provides different levels of administration to satisfy the needs of customers who require segmentation of their BIRT ihub systems for use by different groups of users, such as for multitenancy or for security purposes. There are two levels of administrators: System Administrators and Account Administrators. 1. System Administrators are responsible for the administration of the system resources, such as creating clusters, adding nodes, managing archives and performing storage preparation. System Administrators are able to manage multiple clusters but have no access to their data or their users. 2. Account Administrators are specific to clusters. They are responsible for managing users, user groups and services on their cluster. To further ensure that Account Administrators do not have administrative access to other clusters, an Account Administrator must be a member of a particular cluster in order to administer it. Monitoring and Utilization with In-memory Database The all new Logging and Monitoring System (LMS) provides out-of-the-box aggregated logging and monitoring of multiple cluster nodes in a BIRT ihub deployment. In addition system administrators can define alerts for system and services events of interest to them. In the past, logging was only provided per cluster node. BIRT ihub 3 further enables System Administrators to view the status of the entire system without having to log onto different nodes separately. Trackable metrics include: System status Recent activity Work unit license usage 16

17 Log entries are identified by server node, process ID and product component name. Logging is fault tolerant so that in the case of a system failure, logs can be recovered. Logging is resumed from the time of recovery. System monitoring data is collected in an in-memory database with a rolling window. Data is stored to disk nightly in CSV files. For determining system and service status over longer periods of time custom reports can be created, the monitoring in-memory database can be queried via JDBC, and the CSV files from monitoring can be imported into a database and queried. Figure 13: The New Logging and Monitoring System New BIRT ihub 3 System Console for Administration To simplify management of one or more ihub systems in large-scale or complex installations, BIRT ihub 3 introduces a new System Console. The BIRT ihub 3 System Console empowers administrators to manage, configure, and monitor multiple systems, where each system can be a single machine or a multinode cluster. It tremendously simplifies management of multiple Actuate BIRT ihub 3 platforms by eliminating the need to log into each system separately. Figure 14: System Console Administers Multiple Systems 17

18 Enhanced Security Security for BIRT ihub 3 provides more efficient user access, especially in multitenancy use cases, while better protecting system and data access. Single Sign-on Service Single Sign-on (SSO) is now available for BIRT ihub 3 out-of-the-box. SSO enables users to log in once to access all services instead of having to log into every service they are authorized to use. For example, a BIRT ihub 3 user can log in just once to access BIRT Visualization Platform and Metrics Management Services rather than logging in separately to access each service. BIRT ihub 3 has added several features to make SSO easier and to enhance security between clusters. The new benefits of SSO include: Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) support: permits authentication of users without requiring a password to be passed between the browser and the ihub for SSO. Out-of-the-box Identity Provider (IdP): eliminates the need for a third party module to perform user authentication for SSO. Per-Cluster SSO: prevents a user on a cluster from accessing services or data belonging to users on another cluster. Secure Communications BIRT ihub 3 has enhanced communications security to protect data in transit. This prevents unauthorized third parties from making use of sensitive information being passed within BIRT ihub 3. The new functionality includes the use of: HTTPS for all communications between the various consoles (Information Console, System Console) and the BIRT ihub server. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) for all communications between the BIRT ihub server processes and the JDBC data sources. SSL for all communications between the BIRT ihub server processes and the encyclopedia metadata database. Secure Execution of Code Contained in BIRT Designs BIRT designs now utilize Java security capabilities to prevent unauthorized access by embedded Java or JavaScript. These new security features provide an extra level of confidence that code from one instance cannot access resources on the operating systems for which it is not authorized. Faster Time to Value BIRT ihub 3 enables you to more quickly realize value from your Actuate investment via improvements in the provisioning APIs, as well as via built-in connectors to popular enterprise directory services such as Active Directory and LDAP. BIRT ihub Provisioning API s Instead of manually provisioning, configuring, and managing BIRT ihub 3 components, the provisioning API s make it easy for customers OEM s in particular to programmatically integrate BIRT ihub 3 into their applications. The provisioning APIs allow customers to easily automate cluster configuration for shared services, including through the Process Management Daemon (PMD) both on the cloud and for on-premise style deployments. Customers can first install BIRT ihub 3 on a server, then use APIs to add nodes, add volumes, add users, start/stop services, manage system login/password, and enable cluster storage, templates, resource groups, and metadata database and more. User Directories BIRT ihub 3 speeds integration by working with different types of user directories. BIRT ihub 3 provides an improved UI so that administrators can easily set up their system to use BIRT ihub 3 User Management, LDAP/Active Directory or a customized RSSE adapter to access their user directory. 18

19 BIRT ihub 3 provides an out-of-the-box LDAP Adapter that enables customers to connect their BIRT ihub 3 system to an existing LDAP or Active Directory. Developers have no need to build such a connector, as they needed to do in earlier releases. Developers who wish to create an adapter for connecting to another type of directory service using Report Server Security Extension (RSSE) can still do so. Existing RSSE connectors will continue to function as expected. Installation, Upgrades, and Migration Easy installation is a major goal of BIRT ihub 3, especially for evaluators who wish to appreciate how appropriately Actuate products fit into their applications designed to provide personalized analytics and insights. Tools will be provided after general availability to existing Actuate customers to upgrade and then migrate their systems to BIRT ihub 3. These tools will also enable existing customers to easily and simply change how their volumes are arranged during migration, by allowing them to move just volume data into new clusters created in BIRT ihub 3. For example, a customer can migrate two volumes that used to be in one cluster into two separate new ihub 3 clusters or into a single new ihub 3 cluster with a different configuration. SPM Updates We have added support for the following: PostgreSQL 9.2 default OOTB RDBMS for Encyc Metadata DB MS SQLServer 2008 R2 for Encyc Metadata DB MS SQLServer 2012 for Encyc Metadata DB RedHat 6.3 Platform Java 7.x Windows 8 Bundle latest DataDirect ODBC and JDBC drivers Apache Axis 2 WSDL Toolkit App Servers WebLogic 12c Websphere 8 Tomcat 7.x Browsers Native browsers on Mobile Tablets for IC Latest Firefox browser on Mac, Windows, and Linux for IC and MC IE 10 OS BIRT BIRT ihub 3 supports Open Source BIRT and