I’m seeking help from the MySQL community for what tools are used today to generate complex reports for enterprise applications that use MySQL. In an Oracle world, you have Oracle Report Writer, in Microsoft Crystal Reports.
In the open source world there is Jasper Reports, Pentaho Reports and BIRT however I don’t know the power of complex reporting with these.
If anybody has experience using or evaluating these tools please let me know. This may lead to possible work.
I am using Jasper Reports to generate dynamic reports in PDF format from in-house applications (based on Apache/MySQL/PHP). There is a great versatility of choices for data source to connect to (JDBC, TableModels, JavaBeans, XML, Hibernate, CSV, and custom sources) as well as output to (PDF, RTF, XML, XLS, CSV, HTML, XHTML, text, DOCX, or OpenOffice), the base cost is free, design tool is very straight forward to learn making a viable alternative for business reporting.
http://jasperforge.org/
http://jasperforge.org/website/ireportwebsite/IR%20Website/ir_documentation.html?header=project&target=ireport
Crystal reports is from Business Objects, not Microsoft – MS just had a bundling deal with a few visual studio/programming language products.
Can you tell me a little bit about what you mean by “complex reports”? All products you mention are capable of pretty complext things, it’s just a matter of how much time you’re willing to put into it.
If you need someone to build reports, and you happen to go with pentaho, drop by the ##pentaho irc channel on freeneode.net. Lots of people hanging out there that can do some contracting.
kind regards,
Roland
Jasper Reports, Pentaho Reports –> are more or less the some.
BIRT
all have programmatic access so any complex case, that can not be solved by GUI tools, can be programmed.
I found the BIRT GUI more powerful then iReport, but BIRT integration into web app is not as simple.
Jasper Reports, Pentaho Reports you just bundle the engine into to the app. BIRT, the last time I used it need a separate setup.
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/deploy/viewerSetup.php
I’ve been working with pentaho for the past few months for integration into a php reporting application. Pentaho is a bit rough around the edges but in most cases it gets the job done.
What exactly do you mean by “complex reporting”? Can you email the details of the project?
Daniel, what you are doing with Jasper Reports sounds like something I would like to do. I have a custom apps on PHP/MySQL too. I was trying to get started with Jasper Reports to see how it all works but I couldn’t even get ANT to work yet. So I figured it would be too difficult for the users to actually make use of this. I’m not even sure how it integrates with the custom PHP apps since it’s meant for Java apps. Would love to hear some ideas or advice. Thanks!