report writing

[timasmith]

Hi,

What is everyone using as a report writer for J2EE enterprise
solutions? Are there any open source solutions in the works that
provide GUI driven layout and text or postscript output?

Obviously Crystal reports has a large market share for Windows based
reporting but I would prefer a solution that also runs on UNIX.

I have used XSLT to transform XML but generating XML is slow, and
determining positions and debugging XSLT is painful.

What to do?

thanks

Tim

 

[Michal Glomba]

What is everyone using as a report writer for J2EE enterprise
solutions? Are there any open source solutions in the works that
provide GUI driven layout and text or postscript output?

Obviously Crystal reports has a large market share for Windows based
reporting but I would prefer a solution that also runs on UNIX.

I have used XSLT to transform XML but generating XML is slow, and
determining positions and debugging XSLT is painful.

I am not sure what are you really thinking when saying "report writer".
If you're looking for a possibility of generating different output
formats from Java take a look at Apache's FOP [1], but it's based on XML
and XSLT (because of XSL-FO). And no GUI editor is available, you just
have to prepare your document in XML.

If you don't like digging in XMLs you can try iText [2], which is really
simple in use [3] and generates PDFs . But also - there is no graphical
tool to assist you in building the report layout: you have to do it on
your own.

[1] http://xmlgraphics.apache.org/fop/
[2] http://www.lowagie.com/iText/
[3] http://itextdocs.lowagie.com/tutorial/general/index.html#5steps

Sorry, if didn't help.

Regards,

 

[David Segall]

Hi,

What is everyone using as a report writer for J2EE enterprise
solutions? Are there any open source solutions in the works that
provide GUI driven layout and text or postscript output?

Try iReport <http://ireport.sourceforge.net/>.