A horrible month has passed by and finally better times appear at the horizon: David Kinkade has joined the development efforts for Pentaho Reporting. Now development can proceed twice as fast.
The OpenOffice Reporting project finally hit the QA, and so the first half of the month was spend in fixing bugs. Although not all of them are resolved yet (the full list), we made some great progress there. All the remaining bugs are related to the OpenDocument-Fileformat processor we wrote for this project; the flow-engine itself, that drives the reporting as data-processing backend, is now ready for the show.
It’s actually amazing: Although most of the demos are not working flawlessly, people start to pick up this engine and work with it. Thanks for your faith, folks! All you early adaptors greatly help to drive the development of this engine even faster.
The second part of the month was dedicated to the Classic-Engine. Although our first pre-release was somewhat bug-ridden, we now exterminated most of the bugs in the renderer and the report-processors. The engine finally produces all demo-reports without crashing and (despite some known bugs we’re going to address during the next weeks) its new renderer behaves like the old one. The funny thing is: The renderer of the Classic-Engine is now more advanced than LibLayout, the renderer of the Flow-Engine. So once we have reached a stable state here, we have to update LibLayout to reflect all these changes we’ve made in the Classic-Engine.
A list of all known open bugs can be found on the SourceForge Project Page for Pentaho Reporting
The next pre-release (or milestone build, to use some commonly accepted terminology) of “Pentaho-Reporting Classic 0.8.9” is scheduled for Friday, the 13th. (I always wanted to make a release on such a lucky day.) At this point, all the engine-bugs should be fully fixed, the new parser-extensions (for rich-text and the new text-processing capabilities) will be in place and the GUI will work better. (Don’t judge us based on the progress dialogs yet. :))
Download the latest release, test it with your reports and send us your bug-reports. With your help, we can create the most stable version of the Classic-reporting engine ever.