Support for json data source

[yairlenga]

short version: add support for JSON data source, similar to the support available for xml data.

long story:

I have been a long term user of BIRT (from 2002 to 2010), and was forced to move to other solution, as the product went side way under actuate/opentext. Happy to see it coming back, as it was one of my favorite.

One of the major limitation was JSON support.

During Opentext days as BIRT main contributor, a very buggy data source for JSON was introduced. I I did not look at the current 4.10 version (will do in coming weeks). Does anyone know what is the state of the JSON dara source ? The XML data source was much more powerful (and reliable), and we used to convert json to xml, and generate report.

If the json data source is not usable/abandoned - possible to fix it ? If not, I wonder if possible to clone the XML data source, replace the XML parser with JSON parser. XPATH path with jsonpath, and have a reporting tool capable of connecting with modern rest services. Even if the temporary solution will be to internally convert json to xml it will be a big win.

considering built in JavaScript with RHINO, will be a big upside.

there is a commercial json data source from data. Never tried it.