JasperReports by Jaspersoft is quite an interesting position in the market of reporting solutions. Even though it's spread as an open source, it doesn't lack for any useful capabilities what makes it truly a worth considering solution, able to compete with most of popular paid products by big vendors like IBM, SAP or Oracle.

Written entirely in Java language, Jaspersoft JasperReports has quickly become the most popular reporting engine of all open source solutions. Since 2001, when the JasperReports was released, it's been downloaded by more than two million of people. Is there any better argument for choosing the Jaspersoft solution needed? However, there are business users who praise professional support more than costless implementation. They also don't need to resign as JasperReports is a product offered in three editions.

The most popular one is Open Source Edition. Unfortunately, everything what's included in there is Java Reporting Library, however the GPL license allows to modify the source code in a way one needs so that those most advanced users could make the JasperReports suit their needs even better than before. Then, there are two commercial editions - Professional and Developer. The components of both - Java Reporting Library followed with Graphical Report Designer - are more or less the same, nonetheless there are details which these editions differ in. What else is included is full support from Jaspersoft specialists. All in all, most of users download the free edition first to verify its capabilities and - then - decide to order the chosen one of commercial options.

However, "price" isn't the only factor which lets a lot of users choose JasperReports instead of any other (including paid ones) reporting solution. The meaningful aspect is a populous community so that each JasperReports user may feel as being a member of the group which he can count on in every reporting need. In fact, the community happens to be truly helpful in solving JasperReports problems and answering to questions.

Jaspersoft JasperReports reporting capabilities

JasperReports solution is supplied with all the capabilities that are indispensable for ensuring the highest quality of generated reports. Once the requirements of different users across the organization are different, JasperReports provide its users with quite a wide set of layout customization capabilities. What's important, users no longer are constrained on following the one pre-built form. With JasperReports they are the only to decide about their reports shape. According to that, each and every report may consist of as many sections as it's needed, all described appropriately. These sections, on the other hand, may be filled up with elements of the most differentiated types, including text, images, lines, rectangles, so on and so forth.

If a single report is not enough, JasperReports allows to attach as many sub-reports as needed to it. What's important, all the sub-reports are organized properly so that there was no problems with keeping a control on the whole hierarchy of reports.

Once the reports are generated and modified to reach the form they were supposed to be in, they can be - equally well - printed or saved in any of file formats which are supported. They include PDF documents, HTML, XLS, CSV, RTF and TXT documents, and XML files.

What else has to be pointed out is the fact that the size of generated reports doesn't actually matter - it isn't restrained anyhow but with the hard disk space. It's especially important in case of graphical reports which - in some cases - take quite a lot of place. Their preparation is simplified thank to iReport, an interesting tool for making more advanced reports, being simultaneously a part of both commercial editions of JasperReports.

Seamless integration

JasperReports is based on Java language what influences on its integration capabilities. There no additional things are needed to embed the tool into any other application. The integration is therefore seamless and trouble-free what shortens the implementation time. Additionally, there is Java Swing viewer tool provided which can be used for analyzing the outputs.

JasperReports technology

Even though the product is being constantly developed since its first release in 2001, it still depends on two worldwide standards - Java and XML. Simultaneously, the report definitions in JasperReports are kept following the JRXML format, which is an open form of XML. Simultaneously, the system requirements of JasperReports aren't very sophisticated. In point of fact, everything that is needed is Java JDK release 1.3 or newer. If the RDBMS is used, though, additional JDBC 2.0 driver happens to be indispensable.

Jaspersoft JasperReports resources

http://jasperforge.org/uploads/publish/jasperreportswebsite/trunk/jasperreports-ds.pdf - professional data sheets often provide the most important information and... nothing more. The case of JasperReports data sheet isn't very different, nonetheless one can find there relatively a lot about the history of the solution, its different editions, reporting and collateral capabilities, and about the system requirements. Additionally, there is some practical information about working with JasperReports, nonetheless one shouldn't expect too many details in there.

http://jasperforge.org/index.php?q=project/jasperreports - JasperForge.org, a website collecting Jaspersoft resources, contains all information about JasperReports. Simultaneously, there are hyperlinks to the most interesting and worth considering subpages, like the ones with solution highlights listed or with the general documentation. Additionally, this - of course - is a place which the open source edition of JasperReports product can be downloaded from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JasperReports - obviously, Wikipedia is the sign of the times we live in. If something isn't listed in Wikipedia (or findable with Google), it means that it doesn't exist. The fact that there is a special subpage devoted to JasperReports not only means that such a solution exists, but also provides quite a lot of well sorted and organized information, including the - so called - introduction from scratch. Even though the article in Wiki contains a lot of basic information, it may be useful to know a bit about Business Intelligence as a whole first.

http://www.infoap.utcluj.ro/bdate/jreports.pdf - here is a little gift from Romania, a comprehensive guide to JasperReports for Developers. Over three-hundred-page book contains a complete introduction, instruction, and summarization of the product's capabilities. Each and every of them is explained clearly with numerous examples so that it can be considered a real handbook.