Pentaho Reporting 3.6 released

Since yesterday, Pentaho Reporting 3.6 is available from Sourceforge. This release brings a large set of new features and a even larger set of bug-fixes. We spend most time making the native parameter system introduced in Release 3.5 more powerful and user-friendly and while working on it closing a few functionality gaps of that release. The new functionality includes

• hidden and computed parameter
• runtime security properties for SQL, Mondrian and OLAP4J datasources
• added a more powerful page-setup dialog, as the JDK's page-setup dialog sucks
• exposed environment variables as automatic fields
• a new data field palette
• open reports via the command line
• created a magical "offline" mode
• Mondrian and OLAP4J datasources now can use the old ${parameter} syntax again to parametrize queries
• Advanced-Mondrian and Advanced-OLAP4J datasource to compute MDX queries at runtime
• new formula functions: PARAMETERTEXT, PARSEDATE, MESSAGE and ISNA

We also fixed a large number of bugs, including nasty beasts like caching and memory issues as well as many smaller ones. With Pentaho Reporting 3.6 I'm happy to be able to say that this release was to a very large extend driven by the needs and input of our community. Gunter Rombauts provided great input on his real-world needs for supporting custom Mondrian roles. Pedro Alves contributed on the caching issues and the Mondrian parametrization, eventually leading to the re-introduction of the ${parameter} format. Tom Barber along with the IRC channel folks gave great input to make the Report Designer more usable. And not to forget the almost unbelievable amount of testing and validating of the implementation that came from everyone. Thank you all! OpenSource rocks! Update: A recording of Kurtis Cruzada's Community Webcast presenting many of the new features is now available.

Time to say good-bye ..

After so many years, all good things have to come to an end. What is true in the world of brick and mortar is also true in our universe of information and data. It was a long and productive relationship along the way from the early days of JFreeReport to today's Pentaho Reporting. So it is my sad duty to announce that beginning with the next release, we part from our JDK 1.2.2 roots and upgrade our system requirements to JDK 1.5 on the engine side (and maybe even make the bold move to use JDK 1.6, if the Pentaho Platform completely abandons JDK 1.5 as well) and JDK 1.6 for the design-time tools (Pentaho Report Designer, the datasource editors and the Report Design Wizard). At the moment I have no clue how we will name the new release. Very likely it won't be called Sugar - as far as I know this is reserved for a BI-server release. I still don't fancy American football (after all, its just a sissy [padded armour! C'mon!] version of rugby anyway) and thus I'll take Citrus and Sugar as food, not leagues. Which, after too many days of Lemonade now probably brings hpyoglycemia or diabetes as viable project names. Or I team up with the British and use Cricket terms as alternative naming schema.