JasperReports leverages other open source Java libraries to implement some of its functionality. Some of the libraries JasperReports builds on include:
iText: A PDF generation and manipulation library. It has the ability of generating and manipulating RTF, XML, and HTML documents. JasperReports takes advantage of iText in order to export reports to PDF and RTF. More information about iText can be found at http://www.lowagie.com/iText/.
JFreeChart: A Java library for producing various charts, including pie charts, bar charts, line charts, and area charts. JasperReports takes advantage of JFreeChart to implement its built-in charting functionality. More information about JFreeChart can be found at http://www.jfree.org/jfreechart.
Apache POI: A Java class library to create and manipulate various Microsoft Office formats, such as Microsoft's OLE 2 Compound Document format. JasperReports takes advantage of POI to export reports to XLS (Microsoft Excel) format. More information about Apache POI can be found at http://poi.apache.org/.
JAXP: Java API for parsing and transforming XML documents. JAXP is used by JasperReports to parse XML files. JAXP is included with Java SE 5.0 and it can be downloaded separately when using earlier versions of Java SE. More information about JAXP can be found at https://jaxp.dev.java.net/.
Apache Commons: A collection of Java libraries providing a large number of reusable components. JasperReports takes advantage of the Commons Digester, BeanUtils, and Logging components ofApache Commons to complement JAXP for XML parsing. More information about Apache Commons can be found at http://commons.apache.org/.