My friend and Jaspersoft colleague Matt Dahlman recently forwarded me a nice image he’d made that captures the essence of JIF, our new interface framework. In Matt’s words:
The attached image shows the actual HTML code behind the menus that a user sees in v3.7 vs v4.0. It makes the idea pretty clear that a developer will find this new system cleaner, easier to customize, and generally better.
Thanks Matt, this is a great way to visualize the simplification JIF has brought to JasperReports Server.
Truth is, we’ve actually made things 3 times simpler than even this picture shows!
Matt is actually showing only one of the 3 different menu systems in 3.7. Yes, believe it or not, in the bad old pre-JIF days JasperServer had 3 totally different menu systems, each used in different parts of the application. These menus did not share markup, logic or presentation code and learning to customize one didn’t teach you a thing about customizing either of the other two.
JIF has a single menu system for the entire application with a simple, standardized method for customizing content and appearance.
Just what you’d expect from a state of the art interface framework.
