Jaspersoft Pushes BI to the Web with Version 4
January 18, 2011 Alex Woodie
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Jaspersoft last week unveiled a new version of its commercial open source business intelligence application that it says will transform how users interact and use BI applications on the Web. The company says that, with the new user interface architecture in Jaspersoft 4, the product now will live entirely on the Web, which will spur adoption by users wary of complexity, and also pave the way for a software as a service (SaaS) business model. Jaspersoft is a collection of commercial open source reporting tools that has been in development for about 10 years. The suite consists of the core JasperReports reporting engine, which includes dozens of reporting templates as well as connections to source data (including DB2/400 via JDBC). Reports are formatted with a product called iReport, and are distributed using JasperServer. Less frequently used are JasperAnalysis, which provides OLAP capabilities, and JasperETL, an OEM version of Talend‘s open source ETL tool. With version 4, the vendor has re-architected a large swatch of its BI suite to drive more consistency into the ways it uses the various Web-based technologies that underlie it, such as Java and HTML. To that end, the vendor has adopted a three-part stack (based on the W3C standards) that it says will make it easier for users to work with the product, and hide complexity. The bottom layer of the new stack is now based on a mix of Java APIs and Java Server Pages (JSP); users will work with JSP to customize this component. The middle layer, which handles events, is based on JavaScript, which is becoming a universal skill. The top layer handles presentation and is now based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which will give users the capability to customize how screens look without mixing content or changing functionality. The end result of the new “UI Architecture” (as Jaspersoft calls it) is that BI applications and workloads will be configurable and accessible to ordinary users, who will no longer require the services of “BI Builders” (Jaspersoft’s words, again) to serve as intermediaries to important data. “Jaspersoft 4 is a first-in-class BI platform architected from the ground up to enable faster custom-built, Web-based BI applications that can make BI more pervasive across the business,” Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile says in a press release. The separation of logic and presentation also bodes well for SaaS adoption of Jaspersoft. The vendor says the BI suite–which is being used by a handful of IBM i shops–is available for use as an installed product or as a multi-tenant cloud application. Lyndsay Wise, the president and founder of WiseAnalytics, had this to say about the new release. “Jaspersoft is showing great foresight and insight into what developers and BI professionals will need as the demand for BI within Web- and cloud-based applications continues to grow,” she says in a press release. RELATED STORY Jaspersoft Drives BI Success with Open Source
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