Classic-Engine 0.8.10 and beyond

This weekend, we finally released Version 0.8.10 of the Pentaho Reporting Classic Engine. This release is yet another infrastructure release (yes, sounds boring) that prepares the ground for going to 1.0.

Aside from the already covered Unified Fileformat and the full support for all kinds of meta-data, this release also ships with a totally revamped parametrization API, support for Barcodes (great job, Mimil!) and Sparkline support.

The next development cycle will be a shorter one. In the upcoming Version 0.8.11 we will finally add crosstabbing and Pivot-tables, speak with Mondrian datasources, provide a sensible interface for the rich-text capabilities, add free-form subreports and will add a first version of the multi-column support. If everything goes right, this version will enter its Release-Candidate state at the end of the month.

One major change already happened on this version: All engine and library classes contained in org.jfree-packages now have been moved into corresponding org.pentaho-packages. This move was necessary so that we do no longer pollute the org.jfree-namespace. At the same time, it allows us to move the Classic and the Flow-Engine into separate packages, so that they can co-exist in the same Java Virtual Machine.

As usual: Users of the XML fileformats are safe from any changes, the XML report definitions continue to work unchanged. API users will have to migrate their code to the new package space. But as the change involves only moved packages, a update of the import-statements should be the majority of the conversion work.

As the APIs of the libraries seem to be stable and sane now, along with the release of 0.8.11, all libraries will be labeled 1.0 versions.