After nearly one year of hard work, we finally completed the huge task to write the next big version of the Pentaho Reporting Classic Engine.

This release contains a lot of great new enhancements, which make the life easier for everyone:

• Sub-Reports
• Style-Expressions
• Value-Expressions
• Formula Support
• Enhanced Layout-System with borders, background-colors and paddings, page-break control and unique page-spanning capabilities.

In times where memory is cheap and diskspace is even cheaper, we stem against the trend. Version 0.8.9 is only 400kb larger than our last stable version, 0.8.7-10. Although it is now roughly 10% slower on long running reports, its advanced caching make it a lot faster for repeated smaller report-runs.

Finishing up this release would not have been possible without the great grumbling of Klausb, who patiently went trough and tested every single aspect of the pagebreaking code. Without his effort, I’m dead sure these bugs would have hit us in the back the day after we went GA. And whenever you use the formula-support and think: How did we survive without that? then send a Thank-You-note to Cedric Pronzato for building the great LibFormula library.

But we wont stop here. Now we are working on the roadmap for the next version, making the Classic-Engine feature-complete by adding real charting and OLAP support. At the same time, the Report-Designer will undergo some major changes to be the Number One Choice for all the reporting needs. But for now, we are still throwing ideas on each other. Expect the final road-map at the end of this month.