Introduction
The purpose of this document is to provide a detailed view of the overall software architecture that when combined makes up the entire Pentaho open source software suite as it exists today.
At a high level, the software components can be divided into a variety of forms. In the following detailed list, the general organization includes third party libraries and components that Pentaho has needed to fork and maintain, common libraries and projects that are used in general ways, pillars that are core business analytics or data integration elements, tools that allow access to pillars, and plugins across the pillars that provide additional functionality. These same components can be looked at from a architectural purpose point of view, including four general areas including information delivery, data management / integration, analytics, and platform services. For each project below we categorize in both manners to give a multi-faceted view of the overall architecture of Pentaho.
Cross Cutting Architectures and Use Cases
This section discusses high level cross cutting software architectures and use cases.
Configuration Management
At this time, Pentaho utilizes a combination of SVN and GIT for managing the source. Here are some related articles:
http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/PEOpen/Advanced+Git+Topics
Metadata Definitions
As we continue to build a community of projects, it's important that they share terminology and common metadata. Here's the beginnings of capturing shared metadata to be used across all Pentaho projects:
http://wiki.pentaho.com/display/COM/Standard+MetaStore+Element+types
Detailed Software Listing
This detailed software listing is organized in the general order in which software components are dependent on one another, although it should not be used as the official build order of Pentaho.
Third Party Maintained Forks
It is Pentaho's intention to avoid having to fork and maintain third party open source software, but on a few occasions it has been necessary. The following list is of the current third party maintained forks that Pentaho includes in our product.
kettle-vfs
Kettle VFS is a maintained fork of Apache Commons VFS
Source Path: svn://source.pentaho.org/svnkettleroot/kettle-vfs
Architectural Owner: Matt Casters
Architectural Area: Data Management / Integration
hive
Due to the dynamic nature of Hadoop, Pentaho currently maintains our own Hive JDBC Driver implementation
Source Path: https://github.com/pentaho/hive
Architectural Owner: Will Gorman
Architectural Area: Data Management / Integration
pentaho-ofc4j
Pentaho ChartBeans Flash components, which are still used by Pentaho Dashboards and Action Sequences, are based on Open Flash Chart. OFC4J is a Java to JSON converter that is used to generate the correct metadata for the charts on the server that is no longer maintained by the creator of the project.
Source Path: svn://source.pentaho.org/svnroot/pentaho-commons/pentaho-ofc4j
Architectural Owner: Will Gorman
Architectural Area: Information Delivery
Common Components
subfloor
Subfloor is Pentaho's common build system, based on ant and used by all projects for compilation, assembly, unit testing and code coverage.
Source Path: https://code.google.com/p/subfloor/ (Note that this location is out of date and should be transitioned to GitHub)
Architectural Owner: Will Gorman
Architectural Area: Engineering Operations
pentaho-commons-database
This commons project is a GWT thin client of the shared database dialog. The submodule pentaho-database-model was an attempt at a thin Kettle DatabaseMeta implementation, which includes a dialect and JDBC Metadata architecture.
Source Path: https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-commons-database
Architectural Owner: Will Gorman
Architectural Area: Data Management / Integration