JReport Upgrade Offers Dozens Of ImprovementsJReport Upgrade Offers Dozens Of Improvements

Jinfonet Software has launched a JReport upgrade that introduces more than four dozen improvements to the company's flagship reporting software.

JReport 9 offers enhancement in three areas, performance, usability and standards support.

To boost performance, Jinfonet has tuned the report engine to improve response time for on-demand report generation and delivery and for interactive reporting and analysis. The company claims the better engine offers a smaller memory footprint for reports and runs 40% faster than the previous version.

Another key performance improvement is the ability to run a report once and distribute results to different recipients according to a predefined criteria. A pre-run report can be shared by a large group of users, each permitted to view only the authorized portion.

"Report performance is the key to JReport's success, and we believe that customers will agree that JReport 9 builds on that success," Bing Yao, Jinfonet chief executive, said in a statement.

To improve usability, Jinfonet has redesigned JReport's report wizards, and has added productivity tools that include relative date support, a runtime, user-defined filter for any report component, and a customizable user interface.

For developers, the upgrade provides new tools, such as a cascading parameter wizard and server monitoring. Charting enhancements include better control of label font and orientation and flexible axis label and tick marks. Map definitions can be imported from ESRI Shapefiles or defined by developers.

For Eclipse users, JReport 9 includes a report designer that can be plugged into the open-source interactive development environment.

Standards support has been expanded to include JSR 168, which enables users to run reports as standard portlets to enable dashboard applications. Application programming interfaces have been added to provide access to the system through a service-oriented architecture. The Java-based JReport 9 is compliant with the Java development kit 1.4 and above.

JReport 9, which was released last week, is available for download on the Jinfonet Web site.