JasperReports 4.7.0 released

JasperReports 4.7.0 was released a few weeks ago. The new release of the iReport designer is not yet announced on the homepage, but you can download the new files already: http://sourceforge.net/projects/ireport/files/iReport/

I will update the integration kit in a few days. This time it will be released with a major update and lots of new features:

• Included Oracle JDBC connection pool: in addition to the JNDI configuration of the data sources you can now use a plain configuration file to use the Oracle JDBC connection pool directly. It is included in the J2EE application. Thus the configuration will be identical on all J2EE servers. 
• I will test on the major J2EE servers and make sure it runs everywhere. Might need support from the community to test everything. 
• Fine grained logging and better error messages: I am using log4j as the logging framework now with nicely written logfiles and different log levels. 
• Reports can be deployed anywhere on the server: You can manipulate the search path for the report files using an environment variable on the operating system or a setting in the application server configuration (e.g. web.xml). This way you can easily upgrade the integration kit, your reports and configuration files will not be removed by an undeploy/redeploy of the application. 
• Storing files on the application server directly (just as Oracle Reports did, destype=FILE).
• Sending reports directly to a network printer
• Adding security features, especially a token-based validation function for each data source. Using this technique, you can create a token in the database, pass it to the Integration kit and have it validated back in the database. This way you can share a single Tomcat instance among different applications. 

The main focus for this upcoming release was ease of deployment and troubleshooting.

Cheers, 

~Dietmar.