we are kind of in a ‘decision making situation’ to make a road map of our BI system.
I would like to hear experts opinion on Information Builders when compared to Oracle BI. I am working in Oracle BI but I dont have knowledge on Webfocus offered by Information Builders, so problably users who has knowledge on both sides, has a good overview on pros and cons.
Like to hear any opinion or suggestion.
Thanks in advance.
I currently work with IBI products and their reporting language WebFocus 8. This along with their new AppStudio development tool and BI Portal deployment platform. If you like being forced to use a GUI to build your user-facing components, having no good access to the HTML, then go with IBI and WF. Other than their having forced the developer to lose access to edit HTML, and tool generated code being horrid, it's a fairly good product. Their new push for responsive design is still early in its implementation. Lots of restrictions and good portions of their products rely on being both compatible with IE8 or used in IE. Not much of a fan of IBI.
Related
I have been researching OLAP servers such as Tableau, Jasper, BIRT iHub, etc.
but it appears that none of them provide reasonable support to customise the
user interface. All of them use the browser as the rendering system but
changing their default screens or "viewer" windows is not encouraged
(possible?).
I DO NOT want to write a full fledged J2EE application and drop JAR files
in the WAR. I have done it in the past and was expecting improved support
for this type of requirements.
Any pointers?
Thanks for the additional info.
May be the Swiss tool, icCube, can help you. icCube ships with an in-memory OLAP engine and built in web reporting application. You can embed the software seamless in other web applications, so adjusting the look-and-feel and customer branding is relatively simple.
As the reseller of icCube in The Netherlands, I have implemented icCube at several clients that were looking for an affordable dashboard solution that could completely blend into their product. Based on our customers' enthusiasm I think I can say we succeeded in that.
You can view some live demo's on our website. Also tons of info is available at icCube´s site. If you want more, I can show you some embedded examples through skype if you want to.
Hope this has helped.
We are GoodData customers who are beginning the process of evaluating ETL tools other than CloudConnect. I'd like some recommendations from other GoodData customers who do their own ETL/LDM development with a tool other than CloudConnect. What has been your experience with these other tools? How do they compare with CloudConnect? I have another conversation going on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Model-ETL-Development-CloudConnect-vs-6616061.S.5897711443083538433?qid=fbab6f85-4bd2-4515-8737-98a365bf9208&trk=groups_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_6616061). From this conversation I have learned a lot about Keboola but I would like to hear others' experiences with other tools.
Other option is to use our "BI Automation Framework" that is being developed on the top of our Ruby SDK and it is great fit if you are more "Developer/Coder". It will be integrated with our Agile DataWarehouse Service (ADS) where you have option to manage your data transformation process using the Vertica database with SQL. We are moving forward quickly in this space.
Another option you can use is to use the ADS + CloudConnect as orchestration tool. Again, this helps you when doing SQL transformation is more comfortable for you. If you want to start testing those tools, let me know.
JT
This is a two part question:
I would like to know where does Oracle ADF 11g stand as a framework to develop / deploy Web / Java EE Applications as compared to other frameworks.
How much is Oracle ADF being used as a framework to Develop Web Applications.
I am asking from a perspective that whether or not there are good job opportunities as an Oracle ADF Developer and what the future looks like for those holding Oracle ADF skills.
Also as Oracle plans to use ADF as core technology for Fusion Applications, Is it good time to build Oracle ADF skills as a siebel developer? As the future Oracle CRM Applications like ERP, SCM will be based on ADF should developers start building ADF skills. Around when will customers start implementing those applications based on ADF. Will these be available On Premise or mostly On Demand in SaaS way.
We have chosen Oracle ADF in our company for one of our projects. Sadly, this proved to be a big mistake. I personally have used Oracle products, in particular their DB, but as far as fusion middleware is concerned, I would advise you to stay away from it. ADF was by far the worst framework I have ever used as an architect. Some of its features I noticed are: very complex, Oracle just "invents" or forces some development approaches that have been proven as a bad practice by the Java community years ago. ADF is very slow compared to other frameworks. With being slow I mean ADF pages run slow. The reason for this is extremely complex generated html and javascript. You can check this by opening up Firebug and inspecting the generated html...it looks like something from the 90s...Terrible. Not to be overly pedantic, but ADF pages have huge amounts of validation errors causing problems in making them run on all browsers. The architecture of ADF is, in my view, messy. Struts2 for example is a much cleaner framework which makes it very easy to integrate it with 3rd party libraries such jQuery, etc. Oracle advocates ADF as an MVC framework but frankly I failed to see the actual MVC architecture there.
ADF uses its own javascript libraries, which are huge, practically impossible to modify, unoptimized and slow in comparison to others such as jQuery or Prototype. The emerging trends in J2EE are lightweight pluggable frameworks that are easily integrated with other tools such a Spring for managing dependencies, jQuery for scripting, CC for continuous integration. ADF is a heavy-weight tightly-integrated framework with other ORacle tools, which makes it very difficult to use it any other way than Oracle devised.
Not to mention the development tools that you are forced to used when developing ADF - the JDeveloper which is very buggy and crashes regularly. Developing in Eclipse is problematic, because ADF has numerous "specific" files which JDeveloper generates automatically.
All in all...ADF was a huge disappointment for us. We spent months messing with it, when finally our client decided the application was too slow and difficult for them to support it and the cancelled it altogether.
Based on my experience i can only say stay away from it. Choose one of the more supported and architecturally clean solutions such as Struts2 or Spring.
I have used JDeveloper 10 and 11, both with ADF, on two enterprise ADF projects for a prominent defense contractor. I agree that ADF is complex, but disagree that JDev crashes frequently, or that the pages are slow to render.
Now... why ADF? Read Oracle's synopsis below, stating that JDeveloper and ADF make Java EE development more accessible to "business" programmers. While this does not guarantee elegant programs, it does almost certainly guarantee that, when these developers get into trouble with ADF, they will probably be utterly lost and will have little idea how to open the hood and reach inside. Conversely, they would be lost even sooner trying to integrate the current J2EE open-source cornucopia.
THE SERMON
Source: ADF Developer's guide (paraphrased)
"Since the early Java days in the late 1990's , the Jave enterprise platform has grown massively and today is used by a large community of developers. However, the developer community is not homogenous and includes developers who are not expert Java programmers, but are business developers who have core competencies in their industries. As the Java EE platform and community grows, the average programmer skill level is declining.
It's hard to imagine that there is a single developer who understands all aspects of the Java EE platform in depth. The problem to address in Java EE is to provide a technology that empowers developers to build cutting edge web and SOA app's without limiting their agility.
Existing Java frameworks such as Struts, Spring, JSF, EJB, GWT, etc are blankets pulled over areas of complexity that expose simpler controls to work with. Using frameworks, developers no longer work with the java core API's but instead interact with interfaces and services exposed by the framework.
Blah, blah, blah...
What seems a small problem for experienced java developers is another hurdle for business developers who are new to java and EE development. This type of developer may turn to a a single dev environment promising integration of all aspects of app development in a single technology chouice. Developers from a 4GL desktop dev background might be attracted by PLSQL, .NET, Adobe Flash.
An experienced Java developer might see this a a big mistake, but how would those developers know, unless Java too provides a single solution for them? The solution is an end-to-end framework which pulls another blanket over the technologies, one that combines different framewokrs and technologies into a single product that exposes visual and declarative development gestures as it's predominant programming methodology... ADF."
I have been working with ADF since last 6 months, and i realise that ADF is made particularly large application with strong database integration. I haven't seen any other Framework which can provide you with so fast and easy development of database rich applications.
Yes i agree that it have some bugs, but still it works well if you know how to work with it.
My perception of and experience with ADF is that it is a very solid and robust framework (unfortunately, the development tools are not.) I'm not sure there's much competition to it, at least, not from a single framework. ADF itself is really several different frameworks combined over the years into a mostly cohesive product. Now that Oracle owns Java, i really expect (hope) parts/much of ADF finds its way into Java EE-proper so we can maybe see alternative implementations and better development tools. If that were to happen, it'd pretty well solidify ADF's future (as long as Oracle doesn't screw the Java community in the meantime and push them to alternative VM platforms).
If you are already familiar with or want to work with Oracle(-related) products, ADF is what you want. Given the market penetration of Oracle, it's probably a reasonable bet that they'll remain dominant and your skills will remain marketable for years to come. Oracle is spending lots of money and acquiring lots of companies to try to own and retain the enterprise.
The SaaS question, to me, is a little harder to answer. While it does seem to be moving in that direction, it's not clear to me if it's mostly marketing's attempt to give it that push or if business-need is driving it. And there are lots of questions i don't really track such as business trust of the cloud for critical data and reliability.
Short answer:
You developing Enterpise solution, your product vendor is Oracle - ADF is a best choice
You indie developer, your solution is not for enterprise, you not going to use other products in the Oracle stack - ADF is not for you, look for another framework.
Long answer:
If you going to Enterprise, if your general product's stack vendor is Oracle. Your best choise is to go along with ADF. ADF becomes better with each major release. I've started using ADF since 11.1.1.2, had a look at 10.x and now using 12.1.3, while still supporting large enterprise applications on 11.1.1.6.
I see a huge improvement and its really hard to find another product that provide better integration and support for whole Oracle stack.
However, if you quite familiar with other framework or/and not going to use other Oracle products and/or your customers can't afford to pay quite a lot for ADF/Weblogic/DB/ECM etc.. - your best choise is to avoid ADF. Its good for large enterprise solutions.
Yes, in fact actually you can develop using free and limited version of ADF - Essentials, use other app server as tomcat or glassfish, but you'll be better off with the other framework. ADF Essentials is only kickstart to large enterprise world, not a solution for small lightweight application.
Development in ADF is a pain in the heart. For a newcomer, the learning curve is too steep. I wish it could be more like learning dot NET.
From my perspective, learning and constructing a functionality in dot NET takes a quarter of the time to do the same in ADF. Of course, it imbalance reduces as a person learns along, but that's pretty much the scenario for beginners. It's frustrating.
I have been working with ADF since last 3 months, and i can tell you that ADF is a really suitable for situations which is essential to provide fast development process for large enterprise applications with strong database integration.
Compairing to other JavaEE framworks like Spring,
It is extremely complex when fixing bugs becasue of the architechtur of the ADF and lack of dev community relative to Spring. Spring has large development community
around the framework.
It is hard to impliment MVC architecture with the ADF inter component integrations.
Spring Developers have much more reputation and demand compared to ADF developers.
ADF is very slow, heavy-weight, tightly-coupled compared to Spring and integrated framework with Oracle tools.
Hope this will help you to solve your problem and gain your knowledge. Happy coding!!!
I'm a junior VB.net developer with little application design knowledge. I've been reading a lot of material online regarding different design patterns, frameworks, and methodologies. It's become a bit confusing for me.
Right now I'm trying to decide on what language would be best suited to convert an existing VB6 application (with SQL server backend.) I need to update the UI and add more user functionality and reporting capabilities. Initially I was thinking of using WPF and attempting the MVVM model for this big project. Reports would be generated from SSRS.
A peer suggested using ASP.net and I don't have enough experience to determine what would be better. The senior programmers here are stuck on using VB6 and don't have any input on what to use. They are encouraging me to use the latest technologies.
This application would be for ~20 users in a central location. Ideally I would stick to a Microsoft .net language. Current interface is similar to a datagrid table where the user would click in to see the detail of each record. They would need to have multiple records open at any given time.
I look forward to all the advice I can get.
EDIT 2010/04/22 2:47 PM EST
What is your audience? Internal clients within an intranet
How complex are the interactions you expect to implement? not very... displaying data from SQL server to UI. Allow user updates to said data. Typically just one user modifying a record.
Do you require near real-time data updates? no
How often do you expect to update the application after the first release? twice/year
Do you expect a well-defined set of client platforms? Yes, windows xp environment, potentially upgrading to Win7. Currently in IE.6 moving to IE7 or 8 within a couple of months.
Do users need access from anywhere? No, just from their PC.
What would be wrong about building a simple ASP.Net application in VB.Net using Gridviews for allowing the data access and manipulation? Seems like a simple ADO.Net trial application if you aren't familiar with it in the beginning you will be by the end. CRUD applications are pretty common so it shouldn't be too hard to build it and then refine it as more requirements become apparent.
Sounds like you need to use a web-based solution--this eliminates alot of your potential distribution woes with multiple users. You could use silverlight, but if you are locked into SSRS, this might not be the way to go.
Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
We don’t allow questions seeking recommendations for books, tools, software libraries, and more. You can edit the question so it can be answered with facts and citations.
Closed 7 years ago.
Improve this question
Which reporting technology would fit for the best situation/type of product? I am now thinking of 3 technologies:
Embedded Reports (Crystal Reports;MS Reporting services)
Server reports (MS Reporting Services)
OLAP Databases (MS Analysis Services)
Which report technology would you use for an off the shelf product? Is it possible to have a OLAP type based reporting side of things from a off the shelf product?
Which technology is best suited for historical data? I would guess here OLAP database would be quicker, but that would depend the size of the database, because I reckon you could also use Embedded Reports for historical data.
Which technology would be best for custom software solutions?
I like the idea of having reporting on the server where a user can go log in and run reports like with MS Reporting services. And really only have reports for stuff like invoices, bills, customer information sheet etc as Embedded reports. And also have Reporting services over an OLAP database for historical data.
Unfortunelaty does management not see this layout and wants a off the shelf product, with olap reporting right inside the application with all other reports.
OLAP isn't a reporting platform, it's in the database layer.
If you're going to have a collection of pre-planned, canned reports, then Crystal or RS are the best ideas. Personally I prefer Crystal but it can be quite a pain to develop reports - but when they're approved, Crystal is a rock steady platform. (We integrate Crystal with .NET apps.)
RS integrates just as nicely, but you do have to maintain the server. Their big advantage is dynamic/reactive menuing, but they are just as tricky to develop and maintain when not quite perfect.
OLAP is a really powerful technology - but if you've not got local knowledge, it's a really challenging product to deploy accurately. But, again, it's not a reporting product - but there are some interesting layers on top of it (e.g. ProClarity, Excel plug-in).
I like reporting services. It can be used as you say, with the customer logging into the reporting services web site. But there is also a component you can add to your application which uses reporting services on the back end. Best of both worlds.
Also, you can access data in analysis services or any other database.
Also you could take a look at (our very own) i-net Clear Reports (used to be i-net Crystal-Clear). Fully Java-based, can read Crystal Reports templates, and offer both a nice and simple API as well as a servlet for any major web server. Has nice charts using JFreeChart. Can export to PDF, HTML, SVG, as well as to a Swing Java Viewer you can embed into your own applications. We also offer a free and fully functional standalone report designer.
Costs a lot less than CR, also.
We are using XtraReports from DevExpress. The ratio price/productivity is very high and you can get source codes.
You can use it for desktop or web applications ( or export to pdf, doc, html, etc...) and end-user designer is delivered natively by DevExpress. I believe, this is one of the best reporting suite ( with Telerik Reports ).
I really like Reporting Services. You can embed reports into web pages, you can give users access to your reports over the web, you can even automate report delivery by having reports emailed to users at a set schedule. You can also create reports off OLAP databases. Plus Reporting Services comes with SQL Server so it can save some money.
Crystal reports is very easy and quick to use but it is also fairly limited. If all you need to do is slap some aggregate information onto a report, right out of a database, then crystal reports will be fine for you. Not sure about the others.