Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Jasper and Open Reports

In the end we compared Crystal reports with Jasper Reports, and Jasper was picked. Jasper is not only free, but also is proven in the Java world, and has a lot of users. It is customizable, since its Java and open source, and has support for using Collections or Lists of Business Objects, such as those populated via Hibernate.

Once Jasper was chosen, I tested several GUI’s to help build the reports instead of editing them strictly in their native XML. JasperAssistant was found to be the best of all of them, and integrates seamlessly with Eclipse. If you are an Eclipse fan as I am, then you’ll love using JasperAssistant. It even allows you to preview the report against your database right in Eclipse.