This week's release of Jaspersoft Studio represents a new option for Eclipse-based business intelligence (BI) design environments. Aligned towards Eclipse Java developers who want to build, secure, and share BI reports for free, Jaspersoft claims to provide Eclipse developers with more BI capabilities (than any other) when compared with the reporting tools currently available for Eclipse.
To put some meat on the bones of Jaspersoft's assertions, the company further explains that Jaspersoft Studio surpasses the current reporting tool capabilities available to the Eclipse community, allowing developers to build reports in Jaspersoft Studio and share them among teams or with their organization using the open source JasperReports Server project.
Emphasizing its open source pedigree, Jaspersoft says that the Studio product delivers a true open source platform for reports without requiring developers to purchase commercial software. Users can design and distribute reports accessing any data source including relational databases, "big data," and NoSQL databases, or flat files.
Guilio Toffoli, founder and lead architect of iReport at Jaspersoft, has suggested that the existing (presumably pre-Jaspersoft Studio) Eclipse reporting tools allow developers to get started with report design fairly quickly, but the runway of what they can do is short.
"Jaspersoft Studio is designed to create a richer BI experience for the Eclipse community. Now, when a developer wants to deploy or secure a BI report, they can do it with our server without requiring a costly commercial license," said Toffoli.
Just in case you missed it — in addition to making Jaspersoft available to Eclipse developers, the company also announced it has become an official member of the Eclipse Foundation.
Providing what is arguably more color and content than the official Eclipse press statements supporting this news, Eclipse marketing spokesperson Ian Skerrett has used his own blog to write, "In the last week I am very pleased to announce CloudBees and Jaspersoft have both joined as a member of the Eclipse Foundation and both released new solutions for Eclipse developers. For some people, it might be a surprise to have these companies join the Eclipse Foundation since they are both associated with open source projects that compete with Eclipse projects."
Skerrett goes on to point out that Jaspersoft sponsors the Jaspersoft open source business intelligence project, which competes with Eclipse BIRT.
But, says Skerrett, "We pride ourselves as being a vendor-neutral community, so that means welcoming all companies, even some that might compete with our own Eclipse projects. Both CloudBees and Jaspersoft are making available useful solutions for the entire Eclipse community."
