Jaspersoft, an industry-leading BI platform, has announced its first release since being acquired by TIBCO back in April. With version 5.6, Jaspersoft has enhanced its platform with a new big data connectivity architecture and new analytic calculations, extended its interactive reporting features, and improved the overall platform performance. This release also introduces a new product for advanced embedded analytics: Visualize.js.
Big Data
Jaspersoft now allows federated access that lets developers blend relational databases with non-relational databases. In addition, native direct connectors have been enhanced for Hadoop, Mongo, and Cassandra databases. Now customers can quickly connect to their big data datasets and spend more time analyzing data and less time integrating data sources.
Analytics
Known for its ability to analyze relational, analytic, OLAP, and big data sources, Jaspersoft has added dozens of new built-in analytic calculations and functions that provide on-the-fly analytics and powerful analytics capabilities. Five new data visualizations, including the new spider and bubble charts, have been added as well.
Interactive Reporting
Jaspersoft already had a very nice interactive reporting feature. Enhancements to interactive reporting include a new table of contents capability, which comes in handy for very large reports. Users can now navigate the report via the table of contents as opposed to scrolling through tons of pages. In addition, the report viewer now allows zoom in, zoom out, and textual search for large reports. End users can make changes to reports on the fly without the help of experts.
Visualize.js
The most exciting news of this release is, in my opinion, the new embedded graphing and charting capabilities. For years, developers have struggled to integrate nice-looking graphs and charts from their BI platforms into their applications. To integrate BI platform graphs and charts, developers were constrained by nasty iFrames, which produced a clumsy user experience and created security concerns. Many developers went out and bought visualization tools such as Highcharts and FusionCharts so that nice graphs and charts could be embedded into programs and allow users to drill and interact with the images in numerous ways. With Visualize.js, developers can now embed their analytics from Jaspersoft BI right into their code, creating a rich, interactive user experience without iFrames and without any external tools.
Platform Enhancements
To round out the release, Jaspersoft added a number of performance enhancements, improvements to metadata management, mobile device offline mode support, and enhancements to the OLAP engine.
In summary, 5.6 is a substantial release for TIBCO’s Jaspersoft. It steps up its big data offering and really caters to developers through both ease of integration with big data and the new embedded graphing and charting capabilities. These enhancements reduce the amount of code required, speed up time to market, and lower overall development costs in the process. A free trial is available, if you want to kick the tires on it.