The JasperReports library is a very powerful and flexible report-generating tool that has the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML or XML files. Hopefully, in the future, other output formats such as CSV, XLS, RTF and other will be supported.
The library is entirely written in Java and can be used in a variety of Java enabled applications, including J2EE or Web applications, to generate dynamic content. Its main purpose is to help creating page oriented, ready to print documents in a simple and flexible manner.
JasperReports organizes data according to the report design defined in an XML file. This data may come from various data sources including relational databases, collections or arrays of Java objects. Users can plug the reporting library to custom made data sources, by implementing a simple interface, as you will see later in this book.