Pentaho Reporting began as JFreeReport, a Java-based reporting engine and Swing widget, back in 2002. David Gilbert, author of JFreeChart, implemented the initial version of JFreeReport to address report rendering needs. Soon after launching the project, Thomas Morgner, standing to the right of Will Gorman in the following picture, became the primary developer. He added critical functionality such as report functions and XML report definitions, launching JFreeReport into a successful open source Java project.

Since the beginning, Pentaho Reporting has been an international project. David is located in Hertfordshire, United Kingdom, and Thomas is located in Frankfurt, Germany. Many others from all over the world have contributed translations and code to Pentaho Reporting.

From 2002 to 2006, Thomas continued to develop JFreeReport into an enterprise-worthy reporting engine. While working as a consultant, Thomas added support for a variety of outputs, including Excel and RTF. At the beginning of 2006, Thomas and JFreeReport joined Pentaho, an open source business intelligence company, and JFreeReport officially became Pentaho Reporting. At this time, Thomas transitioned from a full-time consultant to a full-time developer, on the Pentaho Reporting Engine and suite of tools.

In January 2006, along with the acquisition of Pentaho Reporting, Pentaho announced the general availability of the Pentaho Report Design Wizard, which walks business users through a set of simple instructions for building sophisticated template-based reports. Mike D'Amour, a Senior Engineer at Pentaho, was the initial author of this wizard, which is now used in many Pentaho applications.

Another important milestone in Pentaho Reporting's history was the introduction of Pentaho Report Designer. In 2006, Martin Schmid contributed the first version of the Pentaho Report Designer to the community. Since its introduction, the Report Designer has evolved with the reporting engine.

In 2007, Pentaho teamed up with Sun's OpenOffice.org, to deliver a reporting solution for OpenOffice.org's database tool set. This project was headed by Thomas Morgner, and is now known as the Pentaho Reporting Flow Engine. While this engine shares many of the concepts from the classic engine discussed in this book, it is a separate project with dramatically different features and functionality than Pentaho's classic reporting project.

Beginning in Pentaho Business Intelligence (BI) Platform release 1.6, Pentaho Reporting also tightly integrates with Pentaho's Metadata Engine, allowing easy-to-use web-based ad hoc reporting by business users who may not have SQL expertise, data driven formatting in reports, as well as column and row level data security. The same functionality is available inside Pentaho Report Designer for query and report building, allowing business users to go from a quick template-based report to a full-fledged custom report.