Thought process behind Jaspersoft Studio

[rogiller]

So I finally noticed today that iReport Designer development has been discontinued and replaced by Jaspersoft Studio which is based on Eclipse.

I'm really curious about the thought process behind this since iReport Designer was built on NetBeans.

I guess from my perspective NetBeans has a much cleaner & intuitive interface so I kinda see this as a step backward.

Can someone fill me on the reasoning behind it?

 

[marianol]

The Studio Team will probably pitch in with something more interesting than what i have to say.

I think that first, we will have to agree that UI's are in the eye of the beholder (and what you are used to), for example in my opinion the NetBeans UI in clunky and not that intuitive, but that is may be because I'm very used to the Eclipse UI.

From my point of view the change had more to do with the wide usage an ecosystem that Eclipse brings. And also it allowed a lot more interesting UX chnages that relate to how the report designs are built.

I understand that it takes some getting used to, I used iReport for a long time and some things where second nature so I fell a bit off when I started with Studio. There are a ton on enhancements that came with JSS also like new drag & drop (and also draw) functionality for the pallete components,  the new interactive viewer, the integration with the Server, the capability to render and execute reports from the server directly, integration with domains, etc.

 

[djohnson53]

Netbeans has been losing mind share for quite awhile. Most recent (Oct 2014):

[rogiller]

That all is interesting... I used Eclipse for several years with a maven project and then tried NetBeans 8. I honestly felt "freed" from a lot of pain. With the "native" recognition of the pom file & it treating all the maven module projects as one shared workspace, working with multi-module maven projects is a sinch. Maybe that that is the critical reason I like it so much, so if your not using maven, it might not be such a good experience.

From my perspective, Eclipse is used a lot and also it's hated a lot by people that use it. So it's almost like Eclipse is pushed more by companies (maybe because it is more powerful, has a bigger ecosystem, etc) but not liked by the actual developers very well. However that is all is just from my little perspective, and I can't speak for the broader tech world.

[htshozawa]

Well, iReport is an open source project. If you are an "actual developer" and strongly feel everybody should be iReports instead of Studio, you're able to support it and make it available to everybody else.

For my part, I prefer Studio over iReport because I'm involved in several other open source projects and all the others are using Eclipse. I have to admit NetBeans has some nice features but I'll rather have common interfaces between projects - makes adding features much more easier.

[rogiller]

Yeah of course that's possible, but what gainfully employed "actual developer" has the time to take on something like that. I know I sure don't. Anyway I'm not here to start an IDE debate but was just curious about what triggered the switch. I'm sure I'll get used to the Jaspersoft Studio environment with time.