Prerequisites of your environment
As described in Chapter 1, Introduction to Pentaho Reporting, Pentaho Reporting is a suite of open source tools, including Report Designer, Reporting Engine, and Reporting SDK. All the preceding tools are written in pure Java, allowing any operating system that supports the Java runtime environment to run the application. The latest version of Pentaho Reporting, the 8th, requires the use of JDK 8 or more recent version.
Pentaho Reporting tools are cross-platform applications and will run in Linux, Windows, macOS, and other Java supported environments. The Reporting Engine is backward compatible with previous versions of JDK, but it is always recommended to use the latest one.
As stated in the introduction, in this chapter we are going to focus our attention on Pentaho Report Designer. The discussion on Pentaho Reporting SDK will be covered in the next chapter. About Reporting Engine, it is used as core component in the designer and the SDK, so it will be treated...
