„Being part of the open source ecosystem is of great value for me“

Inhalt
Francesco Corti will introduce the new book about reporting with Pentaho 8
Francesco Corti will introduce the new book about reporting with Pentaho 8

After Pedro Alves we have another speaker confirmed for Pentaho Community Meeting: Francesco Corti is from Italy and will present the new edition of the famous Pentaho Reporting book.

Francesco, who are you?
My name is Francesco Corti and I’m an enthusiast consultant in software and solutions. I love working in a team with developers, sales and customers.

Proud of the role as software engineer, I’ve been often involved in presale presentations, public speaking and IT courses. Developing software, designing architectures and definition of solutions in ECM/BPM and BI are my favourites areas of interest. Dozens of projects done, from the very small ones to the more complexes, in almost 20 years of experience.

Product evangelist at Alfresco since October 2016, I’m the public figure representing the open source ECM/BPM solutions into the developer community. In addition to helping developers to adopt Alfresco technologies, I usually help Alfresco to improve the developer experience through talks, articles, blogging, user demonstrations, recorded demonstrations, or the creation of sample projects.

What is your connection to Pentaho?
My connection to the Pentaho ecosystem is mainly based on a project started in 2012, named Alflytics (previously called Alfresco Audit Analysis and Reporting, A.A.A.R.). Today it is still a widely used BI solution on top of the Alfresco platform. I’m very proud of this project for several reasons: it’s truly open source and it is a community-driven project (both the communities of Alfresco called Order Of The Bee and Pentaho).

Another connection with Pentaho are my experiences with my previous employers. During my different roles I had the chance to develop, design or maintain several BI projects developed with it.

Francescos book will cover reporting with Pentaho 8
Francescos book will cover reporting with Pentaho 8

What will your talk be about?
Since February 2017 I’m working with Packt Publishing on the second edition of the well-known book „Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers“ by Will Gorman. This second edition has been completely (re)written by me, with an extended and updated content and dozens of working examples available in a public GitHub repository.

In this talk I would like to introduce the updated way of creating reports using Pentaho Reporting. I´m planning to present some working examples with the goal to show how Pentaho Reporting changed since 2009 and how today you can develop using Maven, Java and Report Designer.

Why was it necessary to update the book?
The first edition of the book dates from 2009. Since then, Will Gorman left Pentaho, Pentaho released five new major versions of its reporting solution and best practices for developing changed. Just to quote some of them: the first edition of the book used the Swing GUI widget toolkit and Apache Ant to explain the various examples (the source code was all written in the book).
In the new edition, all the dozens of examples are available in a public GitHub repository, all the examples are PRPT files or complete web applications and the web applications use Apache Maven as software project management and comprehension tool.

Concerning the content, the number of enhancements included in the five major releases is not impressive but relevant. The book includes them all with a detailed description and a „learning by example“ approach I always prefer.
Last but not least, I explain the topics using a different organization and description. The result is 17 chapters instead of 12 and around 50 pages more than the previous edition has. Considering that the examples are all stored externally in the GitHub repository, the content has definitely increased concerning quantity. Concerning quality let’s see how the feedback of the developers will turn out 🙂

What do you expect from PCM?
The past Pentaho Community Meetings I attended have always been a nice place to feel good vibrations. I learnt a lot from the other developers and saw the latest enhancements of the platform. This time I can give back something to the others talking about my latest studies on Pentaho Reporting.
Being part of a Community means to take and to give. I took a lot from the Pentaho Community in the past and I hope I gave (and will give) something back. This my goal for this time at the PCM17.

Ah…I was forgetting: I will attend Pentaho Community Meeting as a member of the Pentaho community and not as product evangelist of my current employer. Being part of the open source ecosystem is a value for me and I would love to continue to do this in all the communities I will have the opportunity to work with in my future life as software engineer.