Why Create a Pentaho Component?

The infrastructure of the Pentaho BI Suite is a lightweight, but flexible and powerful, framework for executing Business Intelligence related components. The infrastructure allows components to be sequenced together and the outputs of one to be passed as an input to another. The components can be used individually or can be used together to create an endless number of results. Execution of components can be controlled using Java APIs, Web Services, schedulers, and workflow engines.

The infrastructure is efficient and compact and can be deployed as a library into a Java application.

By creating a single Java class that integrates the features of a library or engine into the Pentaho component layer, the new features can immediately be combined with the features of the existing components, and all of the platforms execution methods become available. For example, once a new component is created:

• It can be scheduled
• It can be executed as a web service
• It can be sequenced with other components and pass data to and accept data from other components
• It can prompt users for parameters it needs
• Its usage is automatically audited and logged
• BI Components are easy to create and easy to deploy into the Pentaho BI Suite.