We found three postings from new reporting initiatives. ReportingEngines has released a new eAPI for the Formula One e.Report Engine. A new tool, OpenReports Designer 1.0, was released, which sits on top of JasperReports, and uses open source technology such as WebWork, Velocity, and Hibernate. Last, but not least, is the release of IntelliVIEW Client 2.3.

ReportingEngines Releases new API for Formula One e.Report Engine

The new eAPI for the Formula One e.Report Engine gives developers programmatic access to all of a report's appearance and behavior, offering complete control and flexibility when building and embedding reports in applications built with popular IDEs such as BEA WebLogic Workshop, Borland JBuilder, JetBrains IntelliJ IDEA, and IBM WebSphere Application Developer. Java developers can use a single template to serve dynamic, highly customized reports to multiple users and easily provide users access to real-time data from various sources. In addition, developers can leverage a powerful visual report designer that features point-and-click wizards and several customizable features.

Using the new Formula One e.Report Engine eAPI, developers have comprehensive programmatic access to:

Report Design -- Each report is represented as a composite of report components including structural items such as zones, data controls, charts and grids as well as data access items such as data sources.
Data Sources -- Developers can connect to JDBC, XML, Java objects, and other data sources and modify specific properties or extract metadata.
Report Engine -- Developers have comprehensive control over operations including report execution and viewing.
The enhanced user interface for the Formula One e.Report Engine's designer increases developer productivity through increased customization and flexibility. New user interface features include:

Personalization -- Developers choose between seven different UI styles out-of-the box, which provide a highly personalized and familiar work environment.
"No Wrong Path" Report Creation -- The report design wizard automatically adjusts to an appropriate dialog box sequence based on how a report design is started.

View more about ReportingEngines new API

OpenReports Designer 1.0 Released

OpenReports uses JasperReports, an excellent full featured open source reporting engine, and was developed using leading open source components including as WebWork, Velocity, and Hibernate.

Features include:

The ability to create groups of reports, and grant users access to reports by group.
The ability to generate reports as PDF, XLS, HTML, and CSV files.
The ability to generate bar, pie and xy charts for inclusion in reports.
The ability to schedule and email PDF reports.
The ability to define reusable report parameters. Available
parameter types include Date, Text, Query Parameters.
The ability to create multiple Datasources for use in generating reports.
Support for JNDI Datasources and internal connection pooling
via Commons-DBCP is included.
The ability to upload and hot deploy new reports.
Web based administration of users, groups, reports, parameters, and datasources.
Cross platform database support via Hibernate based persistence layer.
Available in a preconfigured bundle with Apache Tomcat.

View more about OpenReports Designer

Java Reporting Tool-IntelliVIEW client 2.3 released

Synaptris announces the release of IntelliVIEW Client V2.3

San Jose, CA, February 18th, 2004 - Synaptris, is pleased to announce the launch of IntelliVIEW Client V2.3

The IntelliVIEW Client is the report-analyzing module of IntelliVIEW. Business managers, to view and analyze real-time data use this. Users utilize the spreadsheet like interface to do drill down analysis, create charts and export reports to multiple formats.

The IntelliVIEW client V2.2 released in July 2003 received incredible support from customers. Their positive feedback after frequent interactions has enabled the product to be improved with the following new features in IntelliVIEW client V2.3.

» Client OCX has been revamped to work in a more secure
   environment and supports proxy settings
» Grid reports support additional formats
» Column Format includes date and time format
» Enhanced and Improved charting engine

For more information and to download IntelliVIEW Client 2.3, visit http://www.intelliview.com

For a long time, Java has been missing good reporting facilities. Especially, most Java data access technologies have been extremely record-oriented and have ignored the whole problem of reporting, which is a /huge/ usecase.

Its great to see these open source projects stepping in to fill a need that has been mostly ignored by the commercial vendors (if not ignored, then we get something awful like Crystal Enterprise).

Looking forward to checking this stuff out :)

peace

Oh, ooops, only one of these products is open source .... my bad, I misunderstood.

Firstly

1. Diversity is great
2. The company I work for contributes (perhaps too much) time to a number of open source projects.

Having said that let me assert that (IMHO) it is about time the (java) open source community acquired a bit of maturity. Reporting is yet another example of the proliferation of projects that my humble intellect cannot distinguish any discernable (major) difference between. The situation is made even more ridicules with all the numerous projects adding run time / parameter passing / report definition add-ons to JasperReports when JR itself seems to have one sole developer doing a great but very slow job of it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all these very talented and dedicated people got together into a smaller number of projects (I don’t even ask of just one) and produce a couple of killer products in this area (and perhaps many of the other multiplicity of overlapping / competing open source projects).

Just a quick clarification in regards to OpenReports:

OpenReports has been around for about a year and a half. It is an open source web reporting application built using open source technology such as WebWork, Hibernate, Velocity, and JasperReports. OpenReports Designer is a new visual report design tool for use with OpenReports and JasperReports.

I think open source projects like JasperReports and OpenReports are a viable alternative to some of the commercially available reporting tools. I have received some positive feedback about OpenReports, but mostly from people who were probably not in the market for expensive reporting tools. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who has done a comparison of the various Java reporting tools...

Erik

actually 90% of it is from JasperPal. No bugs fixed, no nothing. They took JasperPal and dropped it in their app (JP can be embedded easily), added some stupid xml edit and a minimal preview using a database.

JasperPal is a very nice tool but without community support (and there is none, SF forums are empty) there will be zero future updates. Well, at least it's credited in About :)

Thank for Alex's brief introduction to JasperPal.

I don't even know the JasperPal is been integrated into "OpenReports Designer" until I saw this message yesterday. Only the OR's author know why he choose not to mention it in his project.

I'll work on the next release in May. Please reports bugs or your requests in project page (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jasperpal/), I'll do what I can do.

Thanks,

H.S.Chin (author of JasperPal)

There is another openSource Reporting tool called iReport. It uses Jasper reports to do the actual work. It provides an easy to use GUI framework to create the reports and has support for scripting as well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ireport/

The current version is iReport 0.0.2 and is completely in java. I think it uses jasper reports 0.5.0.

There is another product worth mentioning: JasperAssistant (http://www.jasperassistant.com). It is a report designer for JasperReports developed as an Eclipse plug-in.

ReportMill also released a new version last week:

http://reportmill.com .

Hi;

Please don't forget Windward Reports (http://www.WindwardReports.com). It is the only reporting tool out there that uses Microsoft Word (or any other word processor) to design the report so there is no learning curve.

thanks - dave

I have couple of questions on reporting tool.For my appliacation I need to have a good reporting tool.
1.Does Jasper report support JDBC?
2.Weblogic has a reporting tool(I guess it is crystal report).Is it free?
Thanks
Sougata

please want some help using ireports for jasper reports
trying to compile a first jasper report I was confronted to this error log :

Compiling to file... .\dsf.jasper -> .\untitled_report_1.java Errors compiling .\dsf.jasper! C:\Documents and Settings\Administrateur\Bureau\iReport-0.3.2\untitled_report_1.java:24: cannot access java.lang.Object bad class file: C:\JBuilderX\jdk1.4\jre\lib\rt.jar(java/lang/Object.class) class file has wrong version 48.0, should be 47.0 Please remove or make sure it appears in the correct subdirectory of the classpath.     private JRFillParameter parameter_REPORT_CONNECTION = n

so what's wrong with the jdk 1.4 ?
can someone give me some source code using and filling jasper reports with JBuilder
thanks a lot.

Did you ever find a resoluton to this problem? I'm running into the exact same thing.

Generating Reports with JasperReports
http://www.pjug.org/jasperreports-pjug-2004-04-27.ppt

How can i convert from the Crystals rpt to jasper's jrxml ?

If you are looking for a platform indenpendent report engine with a report designer tool in Java then you should have a look at: http://www.inetsoftware.de/products/crystalclear/.

Free Designer included
JDBC drivers for MS SQL Server, Oracle, Sybas, DB2, MySQL included.

Download Free Trial: http://www.inetsoftware.de/scripts/Download2.asp?id=4

More question: CrystalClear at inetsoftware dot de.

Torsten

Hi, Dion Almaer. RAQ Report is a pure Java web reporting tool. With Excel-like Design Interface, it makes reporting Faster, Easier and Preciser. With perfect Cross-Tab and innovative Mathematical Model, it maximizes your productivity.