Chapter 17. Pentaho Reporting Nightly Build and Support

This last chapter contains two main topics, that will hopefully be useful for completing your expertise in Pentaho Reporting.

The first topic is about downloading, building, installing, and running the latest version of Pentaho Report Designer, usually called nightly build. In the same way, you will learn how to use the nightly build in your Java projects; to try the latest version with the latest enhancements. This topic is strictly for developers and will enable you to access the latest version of Pentaho Reporting for evaluation purposes.

In the last topic of this book, you will go through all the ways you may have to find documentation, resources, support, meet the community, and so on as a new developer and expert into Pentaho Reporting. This topic is for developers and information technologists, and should help you to get support and help during your first project and future challenges.

The chapter (and the book) ends by sharing...

Pentaho Report Designer nightly build

In the previous chapters, you learnt everything about Pentaho Reporting 8.0 in its stable release. Stable releases can be downloaded as described in Chapter 2, Getting Started with Report Designer, but being an open source project, Pentaho Reporting's source code is available on a public repository hosted on GitHub. For future reference, the Pentaho Reporting's project is stored at https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-reporting.

In the public repository, you can find all the libraries, source code, and everything that is required to understand how Pentaho Reporting works and is developed. Looking at the repository, there are several branches, as usual. The master branch hosts the daily commits of the Pentaho team. Of course, the source code cannot be guaranteed to be stable, but it's definitely the most recent version of the software.

In this section, you are going to learn how to download the latest version of the source code and how to build it, creating...

Pentaho Reporting SDK nightly build

Once the Pentaho Reporting artifact has been built, all the Pentaho Reporting libraries will be available in it, as described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Pentaho Reporting. In this section, you are going to learn how to use the nightly build in your Java projects, using Pentaho Reporting in its latest (and possibly unstable) release for evaluation purpose.

Assuming that you have an existing Java project using Pentaho Reporting, let's see in the following sections how to update it to use the nightly build. As an example, you can use one of the examples available in the GitHub repository at https://github.com/fcorti/pentaho-8-reporting-for-java-developers.

To prepare the project, copy it into a working folder. As an example, you could use the project stored in the Chapter 03 - Getting started with Reporting SDK/pentaho-reporting-web-app folder.

Updating the pom.xml file

The very first task to prepare the existing project is to change the pom.xml file. Opening...

Getting help from the community

As an open source project, Pentaho Reporting has a community of people and organizations who contribute by answering questions, providing translations, filing and fixing bugs, writing documentation, and of course, by contributing code. To make sure you can find what you need to engage the Pentaho Reporting community, the following is a list of online places and tools to help you get started.

Asking questions and helping others

Today, there are two primary methods of communication in the Pentaho Reporting community. The first and most widely used method is Pentaho Reporting forums. These forums are located at http://forums.pentaho.org/ under the main category Pentaho Reporting. You can search and read forum discussions, or sign up for an account and ask your own questions.

Another main method of communication is Pentaho's IRC channel, set up by Pentaho community members. This channel is located on the FreeNode IRC (https://freenode.net/), as channel ##pentaho...

What to do once you become an expert

Did you see how powerful Pentaho Reporting is? And it is still given for free after several years. Can you imagine how much effort has been invested from a bunch of developers to reach this level of maturity? How much of your precious time has been saved, thanks to the use of tools like Pentaho Reporting? How many things you will learn attending the forums, the chat, learning from the public documentation or the blog posts written from real experts?

Now it's probably your time to benefit from all of this, but don't forget to give something to the others, once you reach the point where you are a Pentaho Reporting expert.

Help the others in the same way as someone else helped you. This makes the community valuable.

Summary

In this chapter, you learnt how to build and use the Pentaho Reporting nightly build, with Pentaho Report Designer and the Pentaho dependencies in your Java projects. In the last topic of this book, you went through all the ways to find documentation, resources, support, meet the community, and so on, as a new developer and expert in Pentaho Reporting.

Thank you for taking the time to read this book. My hope is that now you feel comfortable with Pentaho Reporting and feel excited to try new projects using it. Enjoy!