An application’s reporting features can be added in a variety of ways. For many web developers, creating a report just entails creating a web page, which looks great on screen but looks terrible when printed on paper. And writing a report in PDF necessitates writing a lot of code, making the reports difficult to maintain and lengthy to prepare. Working with different technology does not significantly alter the situation.
For example, while Java has a robust printing API, writing custom code for each document type is still time consuming. A reporting library is the solution to this problem. The world’s most popular open source Java reporting framework is JasperReports Library, and iReport Designer is a visual report designer for JasperReports. The library is a report engine that can be integrated into your open source or commercial application to produce reports generated using iReport Designer, show them on screen, or export them in a final format such as PDF, OpenOffice, DOCX, and other formats.
Alternatively, you may use a web application to broadcast the output or send the finished page to a printer directly. In some ways, JasperReports is at the heart of iReport Designer. Although JasperReports is simple to integrate into a Java application, if you want an environment in which to consume the reports without writing a new application, you should consider utilising
Server for JasperReports.
JasperServer includes a web-based interface for managing, scheduling, and running reports; a repository for storing all report resources such as images, fonts, and data sources; a security service for determining who can run which report; and a web services API for executing reports from external applications.
In the broad picture, iReport Designer lets you create reports, JasperReports lets you run them and generate output in a Java app, and JasperServer lets end users and other apps securely access, read, and publish your reports. JasperServer also adds dig down and drill up features to your documents, making reports more dynamic.