JasperReports

The JasperReports refers to an open-source reporting tool based on Java which can write to multiple targets like printer, screen, HTML or PDF, Microsoft Excel and XML files etc. JasperReports can be applied in Java-enabled applications such as the Java EE for generating dynamic content. It will read instructions from a .jasper file or an XML. Programmer need to generate reports frequently which is not always a rather exciting or glamorous task. Earlier report generation was mainly the work of commercial products like Crystal Reports but today, the JasperReports library allows the Java developers to generate reports without using commercial software.

This tool offers the necessary features which are essential for generating dynamic reports like data retrieval through Java Database Connectivity, and support for parameters, variable, expressions and groups. It also has many advanced features like custom data sources, sub-reports and scriptlets. So, this tool incorporates multiple attractive features and is backed by community participation. Most importantly, this is an open source tool which is completely free of cost. However, to use this tool, you need to have some fundamental understanding of the programming language Java.

JasperReports therefore give developers the power to make reports faster and easily which can then be extracted to different formats. The developers may use this tool to compile their reports at designing or runtime, thereby making way for dynamic report formats. Developers are also free to inject information into these reports from many sources; they no longer have to waste time to create custom report classes through the Apache POI for stylizing and formatting reports. So, they can benefit from time savings and flexibility through this tool.