A Comparison of Java Webapp Report Tools

I recently completed the conversion from Crystal report to Jasper Report. The Crystal reports were causing me too much pain when using in my Java web application. This is not to say that Crystal is bad, actually using Crystal is somewhat better than iReport (a tool to generate Jasper Report). The only complain I have against it is that coming from Java, I just don’t like its expression language and deploying Crystal reports on Business Object to server reports to end users is a nightmare.

	Crystal	Jasper Report	Birt
Pros	Feature rich Non programmers can do it (Java is not required except for the parameter passing but we already figured it out) Can overlay elements on background pictures when designing reports. More people are familiar with this tool	Free – open source Absolute coordinates Java syntax out of the box iReport is a Swing (newer version is based on NetBeans platform) application to design reports Reports data can be provided from application via Hibernate O/R or just from report’s SQL Re-deployment can be just as simple as dropping a file into live application (no down time)	Free – open source Newer than Jasper with slicker designer interface. Developers especially those familiar with Eclipse will feel at home Can embed reports in applications or deploy on BIRT report server as Crystal Probably can be used in a lot of cases but I could not got it to work with a complex report with multiple different backgrounds.
Cons	Crystal’s own language or VB for function expressions DB fine grained access forced us to use stored procedure. Mistakes can be easily made. Needs Business Object Server. Reports cannot be embedded in the application Potential security issues Harder to deploy. Easier to make mistakes on deployment. Bugs have been written due to deployment issues Costs money	Documentation for iReport costs money (should be much, much less than Crystal though) No multiple headers or detail sections Can’t overlay elements on pictures on iReport. Placement is a trial and error process Non Java programmer might not like it. iReport is not error free No substitute for “Underlay Following Sections” feature in Crystal	HTML/CSS layout. Viewing in different formats produced drastically different results Can’t overlay data on images. Features on images seem less robust than iReport Non programmers might not like it because they have to deal with Eclipse IDE I didn’t figure out the deployment part yet but that shouldn’t be a show stopper