Jaspersoft Community: Welcome to the new JasperForge! We are thrilled to provide this much more advanced Forge platform and expect it to deliver the on-going foundation we know is required to sustain the largest, most vibrant ecosystem in the business intelligence industry. Your active use of this Forge combined with feedback on what you like and what you’d like us to improve, will fuel continued advancements that everyone will share. To this end, please visit the dedicated forum http://www.jas perforge.org/plugins/espforum/browse.php?group_id=100&forumid=117 we have created to listen to and receive your valuable feedback.

Jasper4Salesforce Launch

Phew! We just finished up the Salesforce.com Dreamforce conference - over 5,000 people from around the world. JasperSoft had a booth as we were launching Jasper4Salesforce, a complete “on demand” reporting solution for salesforce.com, which I lead the development of. High points of the development were:

Using the latest version of JasperIntelligence open source in a custom way

Integrating deeply with salesforce as an “Appexchange” product

Creating a “caching” JasperReports data source that interactively pulls data from salesforce via its web services API and then provides the data into the report running in JI.

Creating a language that is a combination of salesforce’s SOQL and SQL that runs in JasperReports - gotta love Antlr

Lots of scalability testing on the base JI platform using JBoss and MySQL in a clustered environment

Custom authentication in JI with salesforce using Acegi - what a sweet framework Spring and Acegi are!

Going from nothing to a beta system hosted at OpSource in 2 1/2 months

Barry building some great looking reports that perform really well - he would get report of the month in my books

Using the same salesforce JR data source to develop and run reports in iReport

We are now working on completing a Web based ad hoc query builder and report layout wizard that will produce listing and summary reports, charts and crosstabs. This hooks into salesforce’s metadata, so we can build customized reports based on salesforce customers individual installations.

JasperSoft released a bunch of news articles this week to correspond with LinuxWorldExpo, so I got a chance to brief with a bunch of journalists and analysts on the news. I was a bit surprised at how frequent questions about JasperForge were, since JasperForge was not one of the news items released this week. The single most common questions was best phrased as “So, you guys already own jaspersoft.com and jaspersoft.org, so why did you spend $35 to get jasperforge.org instead of using jaspersoft.org?”. Given how frequently the media and analysts wanted to know that I bet some of you are interested to.

To me that answer is clear. Any “jaspersoft.” domain is a corporate domain that we (JasperSoft) own and can do with as we please. JasperForge, on the other hand, is the community domain. It belongs to the community and we are only providing the resources. This is a place where developers and users can come, discuss any and all things related to Jasper, open source, BI, commercial open source, etc. In my vision projects that add on to and extend Jasper products are hosted here, sets of sample reports are posted, etc. Just because the title includes “Forge” don’t think its just for the developers - I want a user community here. Have you developed a couple of cool reports against a common application? Post them here!

Finally, a few folks have commented on how we are now competing with SourceForge. I don’t see it that way at all. We launched this site with help from VA Software (the folks behind SourceForge) and they are 100% behind us. (A clude: If you go the projects section of this forge you will see the SourceForge name.) SourceForge is a great place to get started and attract users, but once you have a suite of projects you really need to graduate to an environment where you combine related projects together and build your own community. SourceForge is really a collection of projects, not a community. I think over the next 12 months you will see other company backed projects migrate to their own forges.