Today, Sun has announced the availability of NetBeans v6.5, the latest installment of its very popular Java development environment. The NetBeans community is enormous, reaching more than 600,000 members and spanning 130 countries. Along with the many advancements that Sun will describe in v6.5 (and there are many), Jaspersoft is announcing the general availability of its iReport plug-in for NetBeans. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Giulio Toffoli (the founder of and primary contributor to the iReport project) has been working with the community toward this v1.0 release for more than six months. During this lengthy beta period, the NetBeans community has been enthusiastically involved - having downloaded the early versions of this iReport plug-in nearly 28,000 times, making it the most popular 3rd party NetBeans downloads during that entire period.

If you’ve not seen the NetBeans version of iReport, you should check out a short video of Giulio demonstrating this product: http://netbeans.tv/screencasts/iReport- from-JasperSoft-357 .

Then, to get your own copy of iReport for NetBeans, simply download and give it a try: http://plugins.netbeans.org/PluginPort al/faces/MainPage.jsp .

We couldn’t be happier with our progress with this product for the NetBeans community or the community’s response. Overall, this parallels our relationship with Sun, where we are working strategically together to deliver much greater value to the open source software world. Some other recent examples: Jaspersoft’s products have always been built using pure Java, support JavaDB, we’ve certified on Sun’s 64-bit platforms, support Solaris and OpenSolaris, are currently certifying with GlassFish, and have won the Duke’s Choice Award. My guess is that there’ll be more valuable technology advancements between Sun and Jaspersoft before this year is over. For now, you can track Sun’s NetBeans 6.5 announcement here http://blogs.sun.com/ontherecord/ .

Lastly and in case you’ve been wondering what’s up with Jasper4MySQL (the MySQL OEM edition of JasperServer), we’ve recently upgraded it to v3, bringing it up-to-date with all the significant features and capabilities of the latest version of JasperServer Professional Edition (to learn more about Jaspersoft v3, go to http://www.jaspersoft.com/JasperSoft_Version3.h tml ). The MySQL embedded community surely deserves the most advanced open source reporting and analytic environment available, don’t they? We’re glad to deliver it.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

After only three months from the release of the first preview version, the plugin of iReport for NetBeans has became the most popular plugin available through the NetBeans plugin portal. This is really exciting and confirms the high level of interest the NetBeans community has in this project.
The plugin has been rated by 14 people. Although the average rating is not very good (3 of 5), most of the ratings came from the first evaluation of the preview version - one that was affected by several annoying bugs and was not complete. Since that time, the overall quality has been improved signficantly.
The next version will include support for crosstabs (that’s great!) and there has been a lot of code refactoring done ‘behind the scene.’
NetBeans 6.1beta has been just released, but unfortunately there are some incompatibilities with the current version of the plugin (0.9.0). All these incompatibilities have been already fixed in the SNV repository, so I’m considering a release of an early version (0.9.1) next week, then releasing a new version at the end of March.
The next major features planned will include support for the conditional styles, for the new borders/padding definition in JasperReports and for the jrtx files (aka JasperReports template files containing style definitions, kind of css files for JR).

Giulio Toffoli

After months of hard work, the first version of iReport for NetBeans (iReport NB) is finally out!

It is not a final release, several things are still missing, but it is a pretty good one. We choose d the version number 0.9.0 to underline the fact that it is still a working in progress application. The final release should be completed by the end of this summer (2008), hopefully much sooner.

What are the benefits of iReport for NetBeans respect to the “classic flavor” one? Well, there are several benefits, the designer has been completely rewritten using the Sun’s Visual Library (thanks to David Kaspar to get the time to teach me the ropes of this little jewelery), the internal report model is no longer a custom object model, but it is the native model used by JasperReports itself (the JasperDesign). Teodor Danciu and Lucian Chirita (JasperReports) improved a lot the report object model adding support for events. The original model was not suitable for a visual designer, and this is why iReport (and all the other JR designers) implement a custom object model. iReport NB is the first designer for JasperReports using the native object model of JasperReports internally. Isn’t great?

Talking of benefits what about having iReport as plugin for NetBeans IDE? If you use NetBeans as IDE, you can have the power of iReport integrated in your favorite IDE.

The next version of iReport NB is scheduled for the end of march. This will be a new major update including support for crosstabs and conditional styles. Stay tuned!

Giulio Toffoli