How is OpenI Different from JPivot?

Last week during a client meeting to evaluate a new project, a question came up — “If JPivot does all the MDX generation/parsing,   provides the UI components for charts and grahps and tables — what is it that OpenI does that’s different from JPivot?”

A legitimate question indeed.

First off — this is not attempt to trivialize what JPivot does. We wouldn’t be here without JPivot – period.  This post is more about what OpenI does to improve certain JPivot functionality and what OpenI adds in terms of its own features to deliver OpenI as a complete web application.  Here’s my assessment:

• JPivot is a component (JAR file) that you can embed in a J2EE application, OpenI is a complete deployable web application (WAR). JPivot is one of the many components that OpenI uses
• JPivot provides the following key features:
  • UI components for tables and charts using OLAP data, and specifying reporting parameters
  • MDX query generation based on UI events like drill up/down, filter, sort, etc.
  • Representing the results from an OLAP server in an object model
• OpenI makes the following significant improvements to JPivot
  • JPivot is built for open source OLAP server Mondrian. It CAN NOT communicate with Microsoft OLAP server out-of-the-box. OpenI extends JPivot to enable this feature so users can report on data from both Microsoft Analysis Services (all 3 versions – 2000, 2005, and 2008)
  • IMHO – JPivot’s native UI is not so clean and pretty archaic (See screenshots). OpenI improves on this quite a bit (see OpenI screenshots)
• OpenI adds following key features for a complete BI app that are not in JPivot
  • Security – either via its own user management, or by integrating to existing OLAP or custom authentication. Enabling restrictions to analyses based on user permissions
  • Dashboard – Jpivot doesn’t have one, OpenI has complete dashboard creation and management
  • Create/Save reports– Jpivot doesn’t have a way to persist reports. OpenI provides a well defined XML structure (.analysis files) that works as a report definition language (RDL) to save and manage reports. Also supports the notion of public vs private reports
  • Navigation – OpenI provides a full file-explorer like UI to navigate through multiple analyses and manage them in folders
  • Report customization by dragging/dropping attributes to columns, rows, and filters
  • Tabbed view of tables and charts
  • Provides results of an OLAP drillthrough as a text file dump (JPivot can’t), or publish result set to a custom web API
  • Explore data feature – lets you “eyeball” data in a cube without having to create individual reports, very handy for exploratory analysis
  • Concept of “projects” to enable multi-tenant reporting, i.e. same application can serve multiple clients. An on-demand  can leverages this to have multiple client accounts served separately from a single web application instance
  • Administration UI to manage accounts, application, data sources, and many other tasks that you’d otherwise have to do by hand-editing a configuration file