After the introduction of Pentaho Reporting and the development of a first report using the Report Design Wizard, in this chapter, you are going to leave the world of what-you-see-is-what-you-get report building and enter the Java land of Pentaho Reporting SDK. At the end of this initial discovery, you will learn how to create a web application in Java using Pentaho Reporting, with the goal to preview the Pentaho report you developed in previous chapter.

You will begin by downloading and setting up the Pentaho Reporting SDK. From there, you will understand more about the anatomy of the SDK package, through some initial details of the directory structure and the various libraries and samples included with it. To make the discovery more practical, you will see how to include the samples in an Eclipse project.

After the introduction of the Pentaho Reporting SDK, the hands-on session will be dedicated to a different topic: creating a web application...