Open Source ERP Flash Dashboard Using Flex 3

In my last post I presented the first of a series of demos that will become a flash dashboard application that can be used for business analysis of open source ERP systems.

I am currently using Openbravo as the ERP system to analyze, but since Pentaho’s Kattle ETL tool is used to extract data from Openbravo, adapting my ETL jobs to other open source ERP systems should not be too hard. At the end of the day, the flash dashboard will be able to support 3-4 open source ERP systems.

Flex For The Business User 

For the development of the dashboard, I use Flex 3. Flex is Adobe’s flash compiler. It has 3 features which I find very powerful in the context of business software:

  • Flex OLAP - as I mentioned in my last post, Flex 3 provides ‘OLAP on the fly’ , enabling multidimensional analysis of data (for example, sales data). Using flex makes it much easier to run simple OLAP queries without the complexity of using an OLAP server. The problem is performance - try to OLAP more than 50K records with your browser, either your browser will choke or your users will choke you…
  • Charts - flex enables you to generate very good looking flash charts with little effort. The recorded demo in this post will demonstrate this.
  • Flex Web-Service Client - in my opinion, Flex’s most powerful feature is its SOAP web service client. Building business mashups with Flex is straight forward. You are only limited by your imagination, as Flex provides you with very strong web-service consumption tools as well as UI elements to hook your data to.

In this posts’ recorded demo, you will see 2 of the 3 features in action. The flash dashboard contains the OLAP analysis components along with some basic charts. What is badly missing in the dashboard is choice - currently, users cannot decide which data they want to chart, for example. I will continue adding more features to the open source ERP Dashboard - if you find it useful or have ideas on how to further develop it, let us know.

open source ERP Dashboard Charts Using Flex

Open Source ERP Business Dashboard

Dashboard Recorded Demo

[kml_flashembed movie="http://opensourceerpguru.com/flash/opensourceerpDashBoard.swf" height="560" width="880" /]

July 10, 2008 · Filed Under Business Processes

Comments

One Response to “Open Source ERP Flash Dashboard Using Flex 3”

  1. Raphaël Valyi on July 12th, 2008 12:13 am

    Hi opensourceerpguru,

    I’ve been quite interested in your demo even if more details would have helped, so I spent a few hours trying to achieve the same with OpenERP (I tend to prefer it over Openbravo both for architectural reasons and feature completeness) waiting it ships with a BI integrated solution (coming around, already big parts done). Actually what impressed me in your post was the Flex OLAPDataGrid component, so I gave it a try. I should say I’ve been really disappointed to discover that component wasn’t open source at all (unlike most parts of Flex)! So I had to forget an I advice you do the same with Openbravo: you’ll never ship that for free as an open source solution, so you better forget about Adobe Flex here. Full story there:
    http://rvalyi.blogspot.com/2008/07/olap-component-mondrianjpivot-or-flex.html

    I’ll give it an other try over the week end with Mondrian+JPivot, I’ll blog about it if I come with some result, but I’m afraid Adobe already took a big part of the few hours I wanted to dedicate. I should say I would have be more happy if you stated that fact clearly on your post.

    Regards and thanks for the work,

    Raphaël Valyi.

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