Pentaho Reporting -- How different and efficient?

Hi Will,

First of all, felt glad to see yet another reporting tool. Personally I had been hearing 'Jasper Reports' in use for long time in the market. But it looked like NOT that easy to get into it.. [Not to discourage the tool/product, but my personal opinion).

Having said the situation,

1. How easy Pentaho Reporting to get started off? I am a Java EE guy.

2. What is Petaho built on? It is a Java based app/tool?

3. To what extent it differs from Jasper Reports or iText?

4. Does Pentaho offers security enabled reports? like that of Microsoft Reporting Services offer..?

Thanks in advance.

Hi.

Raghavan Muthu wrote:3. To what extent it differs from Jasper Reports or iText?

Why are saying that iText has anything to do with reporting? It is a PDF generation library, that just happens to be used in Jasper Reports and it seems that Pentaho also uses it (learned it from another thread). You do know that Jasper supports many different formats, PDF happens to be just one of them, right?

Cheers.

P.S. I am not discrediting nor crediting any of the libraries I mentioned, I'm just mentioning the difference between iText and a higher level reporting library.

Thanks Raf Szczypiorski . Yes you are also right. I just had a query and wanted to get it clarified.

Raghavan Muthu wrote:Hi Will,

1. How easy Pentaho Reporting to get started off? I am a Java EE guy.

It's pretty easy, there are really basic examples in the book to get folks started. You can download the report designer and get started right away:
http://reporting.pentaho.org/

Raghavan Muthu wrote:

2. What is Petaho built on? It is a Java based app/tool?

Pentaho's products are all Java based. We have client tools based on Swing and SWT, and our web based products are J2EE compliant.

Raghavan Muthu wrote:

4. Does Pentaho offers security enabled reports? like that of Microsoft Reporting Services offer..?

We do have a business intelligence server that runs reports, it has authentication and authorization.

Thanks Will for the clarifications. Shall look at the URL for the samples.