Pentaho Reporting is an easy-to-use, open source, lightweight suite of Java projects built for one purpose: report generation. In this book, you will discover how easy it is to embed Pentaho Reporting into your Java projects, or use it as a standalone reporting platform. Pentaho Reporting's open source license—the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)—gives developers the freedom to embed Pentaho Reporting into their open source and proprietary applications at no cost. An active community participates in the development and use of Pentaho Reporting, answering forum questions, fixing bugs, and implementing new features. While many proprietary reporting options are available, none can offer the openness and flexibility that Pentaho Reporting provides its users with.

As with most successful open source projects, Pentaho Reporting has a proven track record, along with a long list of features. Most of this history has been documented in open forums and in email threads, which are still available for folks to browse through and glean ideas from. Starting as a side hobby and turning into an enterprise reporting suite over the course of many years, the Pentaho Reporting Engine and its suite of tools, such as the Report Designer, Reporting Engine, and Reporting SDK, are used as critical components in countless corporate, educational, governmental, and community-based information technology solutions.

In most business software applications, a reporting component is necessary, be it for summarizing data, generating large numbers of customized documents, or simply for making it easier to print information that would be useful in various output formats. With a complete set of features, including PDF, Microsoft Excel, HTML, Text, XML, CSV, and RTF report generation, along with advanced reporting capabilities such as subreports and cross tabs, Pentaho Reporting can crack the simplest of problems quickly, along with solving the more advanced challenges when designing, generating, and deploying reports.

Read on in this chapter to learn more about Pentaho Reporting, its typical uses, history, and origins, along with a more detailed overview of the reporting functionality that Pentaho Reporting provides.

In this chapter, you will cover the following topics: