In this chapter, we introduced Pentaho Reporting and highlighted some typical uses, providing you with baseline ideas for implementing your own solutions. Typical uses for embedded reporting include operational, business intelligence, financial, and production reporting.

We briefly described the unique history of Pentaho Reporting, from its JFreeReport roots, and also learned a great deal about the rich features included in the release 8.0. Core features include a wide variety of data source integration, along with PDF, HTML, and Excel rendering. On the other hand, more advanced features include subreports and cross tab reports. Additionally, developer-oriented features, such as open Java APIs, along with the available source code and a business-friendly LGPL open source license, gives Pentaho Reporting a leg up on all other Java reporting toolkits.

The architecture of Pentaho Reporting is also covered in this chapter, providing developers with a twenty thousand foot view of where they might be able to modify or contribute to the Pentaho Reporting Engine, along with giving them the ultimate flexibility of access to source code.

You'll soon be able to apply the rich feature set of Pentaho Reporting to your use case.

In the following chapter, we'll introduce you to Pentaho Reporting's easy to use Report Designer and Java API, making it fun and easy to embed reporting into your Java application.