JasperReports Disappoints

By Allen Holub

December 15, 2005 — (Page 1 of 2)
So, you’ve just bought a used car. You put the key in the ignition, and nothing happens. You turn to the salesman, who looks you in the eye and says, “Oh! you wanted an engine with that car! That’ll cost you extra.” This same story applies to a lot of free software. You can download it for free, but when it comes to learning how to use it, or getting all of the features that you really require, it will cost you extra.

I’ve been spending the past few days working with JasperReports (jasperreports.sourceforge.net). This package is a popular report generator that started out as an open-source project and has now transmogrified into a company called JasperSoft.

The problem is that JasperReports itself is an amateurish piece of work with an unwieldy install process and lousy documentation. You must download the library from SourceForge, but like a lot of open-source software, you must also manually find and load other libraries to satisfy internal dependencies, then you also have to install ant, and run various ant scripts to compile the thing. The online documentation is the typical disorganized collection of “sample apps” with an inadequate overview thrown in as an afterthought. In the you-want-an-engine-with-that-car department, the author of the library will sell you a US$50 book (“The JasperReports Ultimate Guide”) that comprises the real documentation. Or so it would seem.

Unfortunately, much of the “Ultimate Guide” itself is made up of sequences of words that begin with a capital letter and end with a period, but which don’t form a sentence in the English language. For example: “The initial report templates have to be compiled into a more digestible form before being used for filling with data.” And “To use a report virtualizer is very simple. It is only about supplying an instance of the net.sf.jasperreports.engine. JRVirtualizer interface as the value for the built-in parameter called REPORT_VIRTUALIZER when filling the report.” The documentation is filled with programmers’ conceits, like using an XML DTD to describe syntax—a format that virtually nobody understands, though it does prove that the author is more of an uber geek than you. To make things more confusing, the documentation literally has no examples in it.

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