Today the long wait is over, as Pentaho released the community editions of version 5.0 of the Pentaho BA-Suite, which includes Pentaho Reporting and Pentaho Data Integration.

Pentaho Reporting 5.0 is a big step closer to the crosstab feature that has been sorely missing. To keep the waiting time exciting, we added some goodies.

The feature with the most impact is the support for CSS-inspired style-sheets. These stylesheets combine CSS3 selectors with our own flavor of style-properties. The stylesheet selectors are powerful enough to replace the majority of uses of style-expressions for conditional formatting, and above all: they can be shared across reports.

A new “sequence” data-source joined the list of data sources, and combines an easy API and an auto-generated UI into a handy package. This data source allows you to feed data into the reporting engine by writing just a handful of classes. This reduces the time to spin of a new data source from days to hours.

While speaking of data sources: Pentaho Reporting 5 has a new way to interface with Pentaho Data-Integration. The big-data-mode uses a convention based approach to make KTR files (PDI transformations) available as standalone data sources. Inputs and outputs are auto-mapped and we reuse PDI-dialogs inside the report-designer to configure queries. This hides the complexity of the data-integration process and makes querying data a seamless experience.

The BA-server contains a host of goodies, including the final transition away from the home cooked file repository to a JCR-backed repository, along with a full set of REST APIs to communicate with the server. Anyone trying to integrate the BA-server into an existing set of applications can now rejoice in happiness.

So go to community.pentaho.com and grab the software.