Quick, Short post. I have a lot of draft posts that I don’t know if I’ll ever finish so I’m trying to go with a policy of just aiming to write shorter posts- if they end up getting longer, so be it.

Jasper Reports recently updated to 5.5.2.

It brought with it quite a few changes, additions, and revisions- as well as Deprecation.

Those familiar with Jasper reports may be familiar with the method in which it is used to give parameters for various capabilities. In this case the existing parameter methods have been deprecated- in it’s place they have created a rather confusing Object-based heirarchy. It seems like it could work just as good.

There is another side to this, however. Our current Jasper Reports adapter works fine as it is- so this “improvement” only causes more work to need to be done for us. It got me thinking somewhat on the troubles of being dependent on external APIs and libraries, even if they are Open Source you are still somewhat tied to what the library publishers decide should go. We cannot easily distribute modified versions of the library, after all.

On a related note, JasperSoft, the company behind Jasper Reports has been bought by Tibco. This isn’t, necessarily, a bad thing, but it could go either way. And it is certainly a change that may cause issues in the future- much akin to the wariness of Oracle now owning MySQL.