Archive for 2006
After reading a recent press release from JasperSoft about the 5th anniversary of JasperReports and the 4th anniversary of iReport, I decided to take a look back and see where OpenReports fits into the JasperReports time line. Here are the dates the projects were created on SourceForge.net:
JasperReports – September 2001
JasperEdit – April 2002
OpenReports – June 2002
iReport – October of 2002
JasperEdit was probably the first open source project built using JasperReports. It was a simple tool for editing, compiling, and running JasperReports XML definition files. JasperEdit evolved into OpenReports Designer, but was soon eclipsed in features and popularity by iReport and is no longer in development.
OpenReports 0.1, released in June of 2002, was a small web application for running JasperReports. It was developed using a very early version of the Echo framework and used XML files to define reports, parameters, and data sources.
OpenReport 0.1
OpenReports 0.5, released in October of 2003, was a major milestone release for OpenReports. It was built using WebWork and Hibernate, and replaced XML files with a web based administration console.
OpenReports 0.5
In the three years since the OpenReports 0.5 release, the competitive landscape has changed greatly but OpenReports is still going strong. Here’s a screenshot of the latest release:
OpenReports 2.1
In closing, I would like to thanks the JasperSoft team, especially Teodor and Giulio for their excellent work on JasperReports and iReport. If I had not discovered JasperReports five year ago, I would probably never have created OpenReports.
December 8th, 2006
The OpenReports Report Viewer is a functional demo application created to illustrate the use of the new report generation and scheduling API available in OpenReports 2.1.
To see a new flash demo of the Report Viewer, click the screenshot below.
The Report Viewer uses an AJAX user interface that was developed with the Yahoo! User Interface Library and Jack Slocum’s excellent YUI-EXT library. If you are looking for an AJAX library, be sure to check out YUI and YUI-EXT. I’ve found the combination to be an excellent alternative to Dojo library currently used in OpenReports.
December 5th, 2006
Now that OpenReports 2.1 includes support for Eclipse BIRT and improvements to existing support for JFreeReport and JXLS, I thought it would be a good time to post my thoughts on the open source reporting engines supported by OpenReports:
JasperReports
- Easiest to integrate and most flexible from a developers standpoint.
- Supports a large number of export formats.
- Report designer is not as easy to use as others.
Eclipse BIRT
- Excellent report designer and charting support.
- Great support for reports will multiple datasources.
- Harder to integrate with OpenReports then other engines.
JFreeReport
- Nice report designer.
- TableModel based API can restrictive.
- Does not seem very active from a community or development standpoint.
JXLS
- Excellent choice for Excel reports.
- Does not require a report designer.
- Supports multiple queries in one report.
- Only supports Excel output and not very well known.
At this point I would recommend OpenReports ChartReports for simple charts, OpenReports QueryReports for small table based reports, JasperReports or Eclipse BIRT for general reporting requirements, and JXLS for complex Excel reports.
I’m not sure about JFreeReport at this point. Even though it’s now owned by Pentaho, it does not seem very active. If I had to guess, I would bet a large number of Pentaho users are using other reporting engines such as Eclipse BIRT and JasperReports with Pentaho.
Anyone out there try more then one of these reporting engines recently? What are your thoughts?
November 6th, 2006
OpenReports provides the ability to add drill down capabilites to JasperReports and QueryReports through the use of the executeReport.action. The basic concept is to add a link to the report pointing to the executeReport.action and providing the parameters needed to run the report.
To add a drill-down link to a QueryReport, you must create a QueryReport Template and add an HREF column to your report. Take a look at CustomerListWithTemplate.vm for a detailed example of a QueryReport Template with multiple drill-down links.
In a JasperReport, it would be a hyperlinkReferenceExpression pointing to the executeReport.action URL. The OPENREPORTS_EXPORT_TYPE parameter can be added to the expression so that the appropriate export type is passed to the drill-down report. This technique works with JasperReports exported to PDF or HTML formats.
OpenReports Professional also provides to ability to create drill-downChartReports that give users the ability to drill down on a specific bar, segment, or slice in Bar, Ring, or Pie charts. Drill-down ChartReports can be defined entirely from the OpenReports Professional administration console without the need for a report template.
October 5th, 2006
A common requirement for many reporting applications is to provide the ability to export reports to Microsoft Excel format. This can be challenging for a number of reasons, including:
- Most reporting engines require the use of a report design tool to develop reports.
- Reports designed to be exported to PDF or HTML do not always translate well to XLS format.
- Advanced Excel functionality such as complex forumlas, macros, and charts are not always available through the reporting engines.
jXLS is an open source Java library that greatly simplies this process by providing the ability to use XLS templates as the basis for generating reports in Excel format.
jXLS is now fully integrated into OpenReports. OpenReports supports the use of jXLS templates as the ouput format for QueyReports. OpenReports also supports the use of embedded SQL in jXLS templates. This is a powerful feature that allow the generation of Excel reports containing the results of multiple queries. The OpenReports Tomcat distribution contains a number of Spreadsheet Report examples that illustrate the use of jXLS templates in OpenReports.
September 24th, 2006
I recently decided to take another look at JFreeReport after reading some news items on www.jfree.org while downloading the latest version of JFreeChart. I haven’t looked at JFreeReport in a number of years after my initial impression that it’s TableModel based design was more suited for a desktop based application then a web based application. Now that JFreeReport has joined Pentaho and the Pentaho Report Designer is available to create reports, I figured I would see how hard it would be to integrate with OpenReports.
Basic integration was fairly straight forward, and I am now able to generate HTML JFreeReports through OpenReports. If there is any interest, I may include JFreeReport support in the next release of OpenReports. Are there any JFreeReport users out there? Is JFreeReports mostly used in desktop applications or with one the Pentaho products?
July 27th, 2006
The first release of OpenReports 2.0 is coming soon. A professional version of OpenReports 2.0 featuring a Reporting Dashboard and Alerts, will also be released at the same time. Take a look at the OpenReports RoadMap for a list of new features in both versions and for a Flash Demo of OpenReports 2.0 Professional.
I’m looking for a couple of additional beta testers for OpenReports 2.0 Professional. If you’re a current user of OpenReports 1.0 and are interested, send me an email.
July 9th, 2006
I started the OpenReports project to provide an application that could generate dynamic reports, specifically JasperReports, through a browser based interface. Over the last 4 years, OpenReports has grown significantly, in both scope and popularity, largely without any open source competitors.
In the last year or two, the open source business intelligence market has changed a great deal with JasperSoft, Pentaho, and Actuate introducing open source bi tools that compete, at least in some aspects, with OpenReports. Despite the publicity given to these companies and their products, OpenReports has continued to do well and even seems to be gaining popularity.
Now that OpenReports 1.0 has been released and work has started on the next generation of OpenReports, it would be interesting to get some feedback from people who are choosing among the various open source bi tools.
What factors are most important to you when choosing an open source bi tool? Features, stability, ease of use, maturity? Or is the support and backing of a well funded company such as JasperSoft or Pentaho the most important factor?
May 3rd, 2006
Now that OpenReports 1.0 has been released, it’s time to start thinking about the future of OpenReports.
The development of the next generation of OpenReports will be driven largely by community feedback and contributions. If you have a feature request or a bug you would like fixed, please submit them to the OpenReports project on SourceForge.
If you would like to become part of the OpenReports development team, the best way to get started is to fix a bug or implement a new feature and post your changes as a patch to the SourceForge project. As always, some documentation or background information is helpful.
April 23rd, 2006
After 4 years of development and numerous 0.x releases, OpenReports 1.0 was finally released on Monday!
With this release, OpenReports has matured into a stable, feature rich, and easy to use web reporting application that can fulfill the reporting requirements of most businesses.
I would like to thank everyone who has provided feedback and contributed to the project over the last 4 years. OpenReports is stronger and more active then ever thanks to your help.
April 21st, 2006
