Upgrade now – The end of life for JFreeReport 0.8.x has come

First: Let me thank you for your great support for staying with a software that now is 3 years old.

In September 2009 we finally released the ground breaking Pentaho Reporting 3.5.0 (Citrus). We fully integrated the Pentaho Report Designer into the Pentaho Reporting product family and enabled non-technical business users to create reports easier than ever. In that release we switched away from the JFreeReport product name. All future releases have been and will be known as the “Pentaho Reporting” product family.

So far you have not been tempted to upgrade despite our huge improvements in productivity, performance and potential benefits to your business. Let me show you some of them:

Your users will find the improved user interface of the Report Designer easier to use than the old Report Designer.

  • They will be able to create better reports without the help of your technical support or database administrators.
  • They can get the information they want whenever they want – now – instead of having to file a ticket, wait, file another ticket for corrections and eventually get their report.
  • The new elements and layouting options (Sparklines, Barcodes, better charts and Side-by-side-subreports) help your users to visualize their information better and to design the reports they need to be successful.
  • The new built-in parameter support enables them to produce reports that answer the questions they encounter in their working day faster than ever.

Your developers and power users will find complete and accurate documentation in Will Gorman’s book “Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java Developers” describing all the properties and classes you need to get started faster.

This improved productivity could be yours! But so far you decided to ignore that value for your business and your career ..

But here is a sad truth: After three years of great success, my active support for these old releases comes to an end. With my limited resources I cannot provide bug-fixes, answers to support questions, samples or documentation.

If you decide to stay with the old versions of Pentaho Reporting, formerly known as JFreeReport, I wish you great success and say farewell.

But if you need assistance to upgrade your code base and have questions on how to best proceed, please come to the Pentaho Forum and post your question there. Don’t forget to add “Upgrade question:” to your posting title, and the Pentaho community and I will help you to make the upgrade as smooth as possible.

Thomas Morgner

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Thomas

About Thomas

After working as all-hands guy and lead developer on Pentaho Reporting for over an decade, I have learned a thing or two about report generation, layouting and general BI practices. I have witnessed the remarkable growth of Pentaho Reporting from a small niche product to a enterprise class Business Intelligence product. This blog documents my own perspective on Pentaho Reporting's development process and our our steps towards upcoming releases.

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