BIRT for Eclipse
BIRT is open source reporting platform based on Eclipse. It can be easily incorporated into J2EE applications to produce excellent reporting capability.
BIRT is composed of two parts - a graphical editor in eclipse which can be used to design reports and a runtime engine which generates dynamic reports based on the templates.
Following are some of the key BIRT features,
- Easy creation of list based reports and grouping features.
- Supports various charts such as pie charts, line, bar etc. Charts allow user interaction.
- Sub reporting functionality for complex reports.
JasperReports for Java
JasperReports is an open source Java reporting tool. It can create reports in a wide variety of formats including PDF. It uses report templates that in XML or .jasper format. There are many tools available in the market which provides designer capabilities to Jasper engine (iReport for example).
Following diagram shows the high level usage scenario for JasperReports.
Key Features,
- Supports PDF, XML, HTML, CSV, XLS, RTF and TXT output formats
- Integrated barcode support
- Single report can have multiple datasource types
- Drill through and hyperlink support
- Supports sub reports for complex layouts
- Uses JFreeChart internally for charting support