During the course of the last 8000 years, no other invention has driven the course of human development more than the ancient art of business reporting. In the ancient city states of Mesopotamia, the rulers of the fast growing states carved inventory lists and tax records into stone plates. For the first time in human history this enabled the management of large distributed empires, armies, and organizations.
Fast-forward a few thousand years, and the art reporting is still in fashion. Even today reporting drives empires, not ones rules by kings, but empires created by entrepreneurs as well as large-scale public traded companies. Carving lists and numbers in stones has been replaced by electrons traveling at the speed of light to deliver critical information to the leaders of today's business world.
When I first came to JFreeReport, I did not care about the big players. All I needed was a printing system to create long and boring printouts at reasonable speed and cost. None of the commercial vendors were able or willing to solve my needs, and hence I stumbled (quite accidentally) over JFreeReport. After some time extending, optimizing, and debugging in the reporting engine, I was addicted to it. Eight years later, the project has changed radically from its early roots. As we grew from simple printing to fully featured BI-reporting, we left the name "JFreeReport" behind and became known as "Pentaho Reporting". But this original love has never diminished and all these years later, the project has grown stronger to now challenge even the age-old commercial offerings in their own space.
The book you're holding in your hand right now marks an important milestone in Pentaho Reporting's history. For the very first time, we are now able to point our users, developers, and partners to a professionally written document that covers all aspects of the Pentaho reporting engine. After eight years of sending developers into the Java code to learn how a feature is working, this is a remarkable and welcome change.
If you want to understand the concepts used in Pentaho Reporting or want to add reporting capabilities to your own application, you will find this book an invaluable companion on your journey. As the book guides you from the very simple examples, to the fully embedded reporting scenarios, the knowledge in the book will guide you safely through all your tasks so that you can become productive very fast.
Business Reporting should be available for everyone who has a need for it, so take control of your data.
Thomas Morgner
Chief Architect, Pentaho Reporting