Preface

JasperReports was started by Teodor Danciu, in 2001, when he was faced with the task of evaluating reporting tools for a project he was working on. The existing solutions that he found were too expensive for his project's budget. Therefore, he decided to write his own reporting tool, JasperReports, which has now become immensely popular, and is currently one of the most popular (if not the most popular) Java reporting tool available.

JasperReports is an open-source Java class library designed to aid developers with the task of adding reporting capabilities to Java applications by providing an API to facilitate the ability to generate reports from any kind of Java application. Though primarily used to add reporting capabilities to web-based applications, it can also be used to create standalone desktop or command-line Java applications for report generation.

This book steers you through each point of report setup, to creating, designing, formatting, and exporting reports with data from a wide range of datasources, and integrating JasperReports with other Java frameworks.