PBJ 1.0.4 – New password options and start of CLI

The PBJ library has been getting a lot of attention lately from various developers using it to integrate with their own software and projects. Francisco Amores did a great blog post about using PBJ to help with data loading in an FDMEE project. Probably the coolest thing about his efforts is that it’s  use-case I never imagined: using PBJ in Jython to access PBCS.

One of the things that has been so great about collaborating with Francisco is getting targeted, useful, and practical comments on how he’s using the library and how it can be made better. And I have found time to make various improvements, enhancements, and fix bugs to address his feedback. This is one of the greatest things about open source software.

Continue Reading…

My Top 10 Favorite Drillbridge Features

Drillbridge is a tool with an ostensibly narrow focus – drill from Essbase/Hyperion data to somewhere else. Typically that “somewhere else” is the relational data that has been summarized to load into the cube. While the concept of drill-through is very simple in principle, Drillbridge has been extensively engineered to make take this simple process and augment it with dozens of features that enhance its usefulness.

That said, in no particular order, I thought it might be fun to point out my ten favorite Drillbridge features. Continue Reading…

PBJ (PBCS REST API Library for Java) Updates

I have recently gotten quite a bit of feedback from people using the PBJ library to consume and work with the PBCS REST API. This has resulted in a few fixes and improvements. First of all, file uploads and downloads are now working. The code has been in for awhile but wasn’t merged to the master branch.

Second, I have been working with the very talented Francisco Amores to help integrate the PBJ library with FDMEE so that it can be used there in various integration scenarios. So this is a really cool usage of PBJ where the library is being dropped in to FDMEE/ODI and utilized with a very simple Jython script.

To help with this scenario, I added a new compile option to PBJ that allows it to be packaged up into a single “uber JAR” – meaning a Java JAR file that contains all of its dependencies rolled into a single library. This makes it a little easier to integrate and drop-in to other systems, instead of having to worry out additional JAR files.

We had to make a couple of other tweaks to the way the library is packaged in order to make it specifically work in FDMEE/ODI, due to a conflicting underlying library. This is kind of a classic Java class loader problem, because what happens is that the two different versions of the class are both available to be loaded, and the older version of the class gets loaded but that class doesn’t have a required method, so a “no such method found” exception is thrown. But by renaming the package/method when it’s compiled, we can get around it and make it really simple. The PBJ GitHub page has some more info on how to compile this.

I think in the near future Fransisco will be blogging out this really interesting integration scenario, so stay tuned!