Alternatives to JasperReports and BIRT [closed]

Question

I'm looking for a Java reporting engine that:

• does not force you to use a designer to define report templates (and hence allows generation of reports by means of API),
• is not JasperReports nor BIRT,
• is open source,
• is free (as in both freedom and free beer),
• is decent in your opinion.

It's a hard question, I know. I could not find anything satisfactory on Google nor here in Stack Overflow but I still hope that someone might know some hidden treasure somewhere.

Answer 1

There are not a lot of open-source enterprise reporting tools (reporting tools in the spirit of crystal reports). The two biggest are BIRT and JasperReport. JFreeReport (seems to be dead) and DataVision (no experience) are the only two "other" open-source products that even come close.

The bulk of near-reporting products center around graph generation, or document generation. While the latter might seem like it is "reporting", some of the efforts fail to consider a range of generated documents (LaTEX only, or similar).

Part of the problem is that the type of product you are considering has always provided a drag-and-drop report authoring tool because this kind of reporting grew into it's own by emulating word processing with templates. This leads to your other requirement, a programmatic API.

In the end, your API is going to generate the report template, which will then get passed to the engine that merges the report with it's data, formats it, and then renders it. As such, a tool like JasperReports (where the jrxml template is relatively well defined) doesn't sound too bad; because, you can just use Java to build a DOM tree (which is the report template) and then pass that into the engine (perhaps you will have to serialize it to XML first, but it could be worse).

Except that you dismiss out-of-hand JasperReports (and the other biggest reporting platform, BIRT) for reasons unknown. While there may be excellent reasons not to use certain available products (I can't user JaserReports myself due to some excellent reasons), if too many of the products are deemed unusable, you run out of viable permitted products.

The only holdout is DataVision, and it generates either LaTeX or Docbook. You can get most of the "standard" expected formats with a Docbook build chain, but it greatly complicates your report rendering pipeline, and you'll have to get a strong understanding of Docbook's XSLT styling to get any kind of decent style (a typical "beauty" requirement for many corporate reports).

Good Luck, and I hope this information is of some benefit.