Finally . . . Reporting for Eclipse!

We’ve been thinking and talking about this since 2006, fundamentally driven by the belief that the Eclipse community deserves best-in-class reporting and unfettered access to a complete BI suite that doesn’t necessarily require a commercial license. To do this right, we always knew that our flagship report design tool (iReport) would need to be re-built using the Eclipse IDE and made available as both an Eclipse plug-in and a stand-alone tool. So, that’s what we’ve done.

Yesterday, we announced Jaspersoft Studio – our new name for the Eclipse-based version of iReport. I hope you’ll want to learn more about it and visit the new project page. This is a complete re-write of iReport using Eclipse. Jaspersoft Studio v1.0 (available now) contains about 90% of the features available in the latest NetBeans version of iReport (v4.0) – and our intention is to (as quickly as possible) make the Eclipse version our primary product, with more advanced features than we’ve been able to deliver before. We’ll continue to advance and support iReport for NetBeans for some time, because this community deserves great reporting and a healthy, vibrant BI suite as well.

Why Eclipse? There are an estimated 9 million Java developers in the world today (according to Oracle) and more than half of them use Eclipse as their IDE most of the time. Although these are just estimates, there is little question about the important role Eclipse plays in Java and software development. This is an area where Jaspersoft, in total, will strive to be a helpful and forceful presence. For example, there is additional value for our BI suite community who can now build their reports and data integration jobs (using Jaspersoft ETL) within the same Eclipse framework, yielding greater simplicity in their design environment.

Finally . . . reporting for Eclipse! With this release, there was celebration at Jaspersoft and a collective exhale as we delivered something that the Jaspersoft community has asked about for some time. Beyond our limited resources and a highly-prioritized roadmap, we have a requirement to maintain high standards that we never want to compromise. So, getting to v1.0 wasn’t easy, but it was important to take the time and to get it right.

My deep thanks and gratitude are extended to the lead Jaspersoft engineers who made this happen: Giulio Toffoli, father of iReport and on-going architect of so much of what we do at Jaspersoft; Teodor Danciu, father of JasperReports our other technical founder/architect and constant collaborator with Giulio on this project; Slavic (Chicu Veaceslav), primary engineer and apprentice working with Giulio; and Yura Bablyukh, lead tester and reviewer. Soon, I’m sure, they’ll have the thanks and gratitude of the Eclipse community as well.

My message to the Eclipse Community: Try Jaspersoft Studio! It’s free, easy and powerful. With it you can do far more with your data than you can with other tools. And tell all your friends. Because we have more planned for you in the future, destined to make you an even more successful BI Builder.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft