JasperReportsJaspersoft ® is the force behind JasperReports ®, Jasper iReport ®, and JasperServer ®, which together form a solid open-source reporting solution. At the core is JasperReports, a reporting engine and API. The JasperServer embeds the JasperReports engine and provides a user-friendly, web-based interface for end-users to run and view reports. The iReport is an installed client tool built on top of the JasperReports library, that lets report developers create reports using a graphical user interface instead of coding. Components Jasper’s product suite is fairly broad (although not as broad as Pentaho) including reporting, OLAP analysis, and Data Integration/ETL. The open-source community edition includes the following components for reporting:
Top General Impressions JasperReports is a tried-and-true basis for reporting, and its iReport report designer and JasperServer are solid tools, capable of creating and running most traditional “real-world” report designs. We do, however, find the iReport designer to be significantly less usable than the BIRT Designer due to its pixel positioning approach and its emphasis on paginated reports. We also believe that Jasper is showing its age a bit – it is the oldest of BIRT and Pentaho. Thus, unlike BIRT (and to a lesser extent, Pentaho), Jasper does not have report interactivity and modern web standards (CSS, XML, etc) built into its foundation. Jasper does have some of these capabilities, but they feel tacked on instead of being an integral part of Jasper’s approach. Said another way, Jasper seems to have taken paper reports as its starting point and worked to replicate them on the web, where BIRT was built with rich internet applications in mind. Meanwhile, both BIRT and Pentaho are actively enhancing their report designers and adding the functionality needed to create the next generation of reports and data visualization. In contrast, Jasper’s iReport designer has not changed much in recent years, other than minor enhancements. Jasper iReport Designer Jasper iReport is a WYSIWIG tool that lets you create reports using a graphical user interface, as opposed to creating reports programmatically using the Jasper Reports Library. These reports can then be run by the Jasper Report Engine or the JasperServer. iReport is available as both a stand-alone, installed client tool, or as a plug-in for the NetBeans IDE. Jasper iReport differs from the BIRT Designer and the Pentaho Report Designer in a few major ways: 1) Its “pixel positioning” approach, 2) Its emphasis on pagination, 3) Its reliance on sub-reports, and 4) Its requirement that reports be compiled. The Jasper iReport report designer is a solid tool that has been around many years and is capable of producing fairly complex report designs. However, it can be difficult to use and the learning curve is steep. Much of this is due to Jasper’s underlying approaches to report design. Jasper, like Pentaho, is in the “pixel positioning” school of report design, where the report designer must explicitly place each control and field on the page and format them individually. This means drawing line-drawing your own tables, handling borders and formatting for each cell individually instead of for the table as a whole. This makes things especially tedious if you want to add, delete, or reorder columns. “Pixel positioning” is very different than the BIRT’s approach, which is table and grid-oriented, much like how web pages and spreadsheets are usually developed. So with BIRT, there is a “table” element in the palette that makes it easier to create and format tables as a whole, and adding, deleting, or reordering columns is a snap. Jasper’s emphasis on pagination and pixel-positioning gives report developers fine-grained control over the look report, but also limits the report’s ability to adapt to different-sized displays. So, for example, if you want a report to look good when printed on an 8.5”x11” sheet of paper, that the report will only be as wide as a sheet of paper even when displayed on a widescreen monitor with lots more horizontal screen real estate. Also, like Pentaho, Jasper is very dependent on sub-reports. If you want to use multiple data sources, use a query’s result set more than once in a report, or have side-by-side report components, you need to use sub-reports. While sub-reports are great for re-using report pieces across many different reports, requiring sub-reports for the above use cases adds unnecessary difficulty and complexity to the report design process:
Finally, unlike BIRT and Pentaho, Jasper requires that you compile reports prior to running them. This means that report developers must have the entire Java SDK installed. Compilation also adds an extra step to the process of deploying reports. Also, since the compiled Jasper report executables are Java byte-code, revision control is difficult since it is impossible to identify the differences between versions of a binary file.
Top Strengths and Weaknesses of Jasper iReport Designer Below are some of the strengths and weaknesses of the Jasper iReport Designer, as compared to BIRT and Pentaho’s report designers. Note that some of these strengths and weaknesses are really due to the behavior of the underlying JasperReports library, not the iReport Designer itself. However, we include them here because the report developer is most likely to encounter them. Strengths of Jasper iReport Designer
Weaknesses of Jasper iReport Designer
Top Conclusions For report designers we strongly prefer the much more usable and powerful BIRT Report Designer. Top Update Each of the products reviewed has had a major release recently, including Jaspersoft 4, Pentaho BI 4 and BIRT 3.7. Innovent will be releasing an update to our comparison in February 2012 so please check back.
See Also: OSS Reporting Comparison Matrix Jaspersoft is a registered trademark of Jaspersoft Corporation. |
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