The Orlando, Florida-based company announced that the JFreeReport project has joined the Pentaho open source community as a permanent member. The JFreeReport reporting engine, which is a free Java report library that generates reports using data from a Swing JTable, will be renamed Pentaho Reporting.
The embeddable software lets developers access and format data from data sources including relational databases like MySQL, OLAP, and XML. It serves up reports in PDF, HTML, and Excel formats.
JFreeReport’s creator, Thomas Morgner, has also been bought on board as Pentaho’s chief architect of reporting solutions.
Additionally, Pentaho has also announced a new beta version of a report design wizard for JFreeReport that has been built by Pentaho community members. It is downloadable from the sourceforge.net website.
Pentaho’s strategy of pulling together a comprehensive BI suite of interoperable open source components is starting to come together nicely. Last November it introduced the Mondrian OLAP Server as another permanent fixture to its LAMP-like BI stack.
The Pentaho open source project was started in 2002 by former executives of leading commercial software firms like IBM Corp, Hyperion Solutions Corp, Cognos Inc, Oracle Corp and SAS Institute.
The project aims to pull together an interoperable set of open source reporting, analysis, dashboarding, workflow and data mining capabilities which can be rapidly configured into a comprehensive, integrated BI stack.
Other projects that come under Pentaho’s stewardship include JPivot, Firebird RDBMS, Enhyra Shark, Weka Data Mining, and Eclipse BIRT. The only missing component of the stack so far is an extract, transform and load (ETL) component.
