Classic-Engine 0.8.10 and beyond

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:33:00 GMT

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.

Sunny days for the Flow-Engine

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 09:47:00 GMT

Its finally gone public: OpenOffice uses the new Pentaho Reporting Flow Engine as backend for their new Report Designer.

I strongly believe that this is a big win for both communities. OpenOffice was in bad need for a sane reporting system, that is fully integrated into the office suite. Sure, with OpenOffice 2.0, they already introduced one - but this one was more or less a extended mail-merge system. And honestly, I was never able to design a report from scratch with that thing.

Ocke Jansen created a modern (and beautiful) UI to design banded reports now. Adding elements to the report is now a lot easier - just grab the mouse and drag'n'drop them where you want them to appear. Simple and easy to use - that's how reporting should be.

And once you've finished the design, you heat up the engine and tell it whether you want a Text-Document or a Spreasheet-Document. And just in the twinkling of an eye later you get the results.

But the interesting part lies hidden deep inside the engine: The Flow-Engine works natively on the OpenOffice document structures. The engine does not waste time converting the OpenOffice-tables, paragraphs and everything else into an internal proprietary representation - simple take what we get and process it immediatly.

And we do it fast. Displaying the results in the OpenOffice-Writer takes more time than the report generation itself.

And we do it conservatively, with as little memory as possible while preserving all incoming report structures. So no matter what valid OpenDocument content you want to process - the engine will happily accept it from you and produces all the report you always wanted to produce.

Reporting Tales - flow-engine tag

Classic-Engine 0.8.10 and beyond

Sunny days for the Flow-Engine