Chapter 9. Pentaho App Builder

Pentaho App Builder is one plugin you can use to build your Pentaho plugins. The most interesting part of it is that you don't need to create any code to get it working. Yes, you heard right, no code.

In this chapter, you will learn about:

• Pentaho App Builder

• Community Plugin Kick-starter

• Creating a dashboard

• Making a plugin available on the marketplace

By the end of this chapter, you will understand Pentaho App Builder and how to work with it. There was a time when you would have needed to know how to write Java code for the back end of the plugin, but now it's much more simple and more accessible to many more people.

You will also know what the Community Plugin Kick-starter (CPK) is and its relationship with Pentaho App Builder. You really need to understand the concepts behind CPK, because that's where most of the magic happens. Pentaho App Builder is just a graphical interface that leverages the work. You will also see that with CPK, you are able to make use of...

Understanding Pentaho App Builder

	"Sparkl, or Pentaho App Builder, is a plugin creator instrument that sits on 2 major cornerstones of Pentaho: CTools and PDI, aiming to leverage as much as possible of our existing stack."
	--Pedro Alves

The main idea is to use both of the two most amazing tools in Pentaho: the CTools and Kettle (also known as Pentaho Data Integration). If you know how to build Kettle jobs and transformations and also know how to build a dashboard, you should be able to build a Pentaho plugin. If not, it's about time to learn. I can recommend you two books: https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/pentaho-data-integration-beginners-guide-second-edition and https://www.packtpub.com/big-data-and-business-intelligence/pentaho-data-integration-4-cookbook.

If you didn't know Java code, it would be hard for you to create a plugin, but that's not the case anymore as you are able to do it without the need to write Java code. You can also create a CTools dashboard...

Installing Pentaho App Builder

You can install Pentaho App Builder using Marketplace, and you just need to refer to the instructions in the first chapter. Pentaho App Builder has some dependencies, so make sure you have them installed:

• CPF: Community Plugin Framework

• CDE: Community Dashboard Editor

• CDF: Community Dashboard Framework

• CDA: Community Data Access

Create a new plugin

Open Pentaho App Builder using the PUC menu, or directly from http://localhost:8080/pentaho/plugin/sparkl/api/main. When you start Pentaho App Builder, you will be in the following dashboard. I referred to the dashboard, because Pentaho App Builder is itself dashboard:

In the preceding image, you will find the following buttons/options:

1. Sort plugins by: This is to sort the plugins that are available in your Pentaho instance. Here, you only see the plugins that were built using Pentaho App Builder or CPK.

2. Refresh: This refreshes the list of available plugins.

3. Create a new Plugin: Click this plus sign to be able to create new plugins. You will learn more about this later in the chapter.

4. Play: This will open/execute the main dashboard of the plugin.

5. Edit: You will be redirected to another window where you can edit the metadata of the plugin, or create/edit/remove end points.

6. Remove: This deletes the plugin from the system folder. The files will be removed from the system...

Summary

As you can see, it's pretty simple to create a new plugin for Pentaho. I really hope you can have a brilliant idea that we can use, that becomes available on the marketplace.

In this chapter, you learned that you can build a plugin just by creating endpoints that are accessible from the browser, and this can be very useful when integrating Pentaho with third-party applications.

In the next chapter, we will cover what we have missed until now, for example, how to embed a CDF/CDE dashboard in a third-party application and how to perform debugging.