Jaspersoft 5.0 Enables Business Intelligence with HTML5

Sean Michael

Updated · Nov 14, 2012

Open source business intelligence vendor Jaspersoft is updating its commercial platform with a new release. The Jaspersoft 5.0 release includes new HTML5-based visualization capabilities that aren’t yet available in the company’s community open source release.

The Jaspersoft 5.0 release goes beyond the new interactivity options the company introduced in the 4.7 release that debuted in July.

“We have replaced our charting engine with an HTML5 charting engine,” Mike Boyarski, Jaspersoft’s director of Product Marketing , told EnterpriseAppsToday.

The charting engine can now deliver interactive views of OLAP data, whereas previous versions offered only static views. By leveraging HTML5, the charts look and work the same on mobile platforms as well as traditional desktops.

Beefed up In-Memory Analytics

The Jaspersoft 5.0 platform can enable users to connect to multiple data sources at the same time. Boyarski explained that all the disparate sources of data can then be combined into a single virtual database for analysis.

The new release also improves on the in-memory capabilities of the platform. Previously Jaspersoft could deliver as much as 100 gigabytes of results in–memory. The system has been scaled up with a new caching model that enables memory distribution across a larger footprint of servers. With this new caching layer, Jaspersoft 5.0 can deliver as much a terabyte of in-memory results.

Boyarski stressed that a terabyte of results is a massive data set that would be triggered from a large data query. The results don’t replicate the underlying schema of the original data sources, he noted.

Open Source Difference

The new Jaspersoft 5.0 release is currently only available in a commercial edition. The company also sponsors an open source community edition that will see a new release in the coming weeks. There are a number of major differences between the two releases.

“The charting engine, the in-memory engine and the data virtualization pieces are only in the commercial release,” Boyarski said. “The community edition will provide more interactive viewing of reports.”

The community edition is suitable for reporting and mid-sized analytics requirements, Boyarski said, although it’s not as sophisticated as the commercial release.

“The HTML5 work is currently not in the community release, but we’ll likely find a way to get that in there,” Boyarski said. “But that won’t happen in the release that comes in next 45 days.”

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.

Sean Michael
Sean Michael

Sean Michael is a writer who focuses on innovation and how science and technology intersect with industry, technology Wordpress, VMware Salesforce, And Application tech. TechCrunch Europas shortlisted her for the best tech journalist award. She enjoys finding stories that open people's eyes. She graduated from the University of California.

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