Community Dashboard Framework (CDF) allows BI developers to quickly and easily create dynamic dashboards which allow users to explore and understand large amounts of data using a variety of charts, tables, and other components and then “drill down” to the exact data they want. This framework quickly creates dashboards by using web technologies such as JavaScript, CSS, and HTML, which allows the dashboard designer to control the dashboard’s whole lifecycle without resorting to Java coding. This element of CTools has been a part of the Pentaho platform since the 3.0 version, and is now the foundation for all the implemented dashboards in the system.
CDF has five main advantages:
- Based in open source technology
- Uses popular web technologies, such as Ajax, HTML, and CSS3
- Manages the components' lifecycles and interactions between them
- Separates the HTML design from the component definition
- Allows for extensibility