Roadmap

Overview

This document should provide a general view of the vision for upcoming releases.  For a comprehensive listing of current issues / patches, please refer to the issue tracker, where any issues earmarked for a specific release will be marked as such.  The Jira's roadmap provides a nice view of those issues (also accesible from the hyperlinks on this page).  As always, priority is given to funded requests, but you can have your favorite issues escalated by voting for them there - so don't be afraid to speak up!

And now, on with the show...

1.2.2

The goal of version 1.2.2 is mainly to streamline/improve the installation/configuration procedure, improve documentation, and maybe apply some of the low impact patches that are already complete but didn't make it into version 1.2.1.  Areas of focus include:

  • Optionally re/install and re/configure ALL components or one. E.g., Phoenix, Cocoon, Tomcat, etc.
  • Apply newer JARs to xReporter as necessary (avalon, icu4j, etc.)
  • Simplify customization of ports, paths, etc. for each component by putting them all in one place
  • Quickly and easily install multiple instances of all components on the same machine
  • Apply custom patches during re/build process
  • Deploy custom components (JAAS implementation, etc.)
  • Relocate report-specific stylesheets from xreporter-cocoon (eliminate xreporter-cocoon deploy)
  • Provide wrapper target for xreporter seed, configure, deploy processes

1.3.0

1.3.0 should be a quick follow-up release to 1.2.2 and will include higher impact patches that were not quite ready for release 1.2.2, or were complete but were significant enough to warrant caution.  Most notably,

  • Discrete subreports
  • Miscellaneous encoding issues
  • Volatile temporary tables (requiring cached database connections)
  • Default roles / DAC
  • Tighter IP/port access control on xreporter's http server
  • Custom output formats   

1.3.x

We depend on the community for prioritization of any issue, but the issues that make it into any releases between 1.3.0 and 2.0 will be even more dependent on that feedback.  Release 2.0 will likely include significant architectural changes, and nobody likes to resolve an issue twice...  Generally speaking, it's probably safe to say that anything requiring too much effort will be delayed until 2.0.  However, some candidates for this time period are

  • Charting
  • Pivot tables
  • Inline subreports
  • Output sections (reports with a sequence of queries)

2.0.0

Release 2.0 is shaping up to be 'quantum leap' from the architectural decisions made in previous releases.  In short, we think we'd like to focus on making the framework as container-agnostic as possible, and we'll likely be redefining roles of client and server components in the process.  The HTTP interface should remain, but an additional interface should be provided for those who'd just as soon eliminate the HTTP layer altogether.

The idea is that these changes should make xReporter even more flexible and ease the barrier to entry for new developers.  And besides, we think it's neat-o.  :-)

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