Comparision of XSLT and Jasper?

[Sangram Singh]

Hi,



Can any one provide me comaprision between XSL-FO and Jasper??


Thanks in advance...


Regards
Sangram Singh
[ December 13, 2006: Message edited by: Sangram Singh ]

[Ulf Dittmer]

For a minute I was confused because I thought of Jasper, the JSP engine used in Tomcat, but you're probably talking about JasperReports.

JasperReports is a library that helps create reports in HTML and PDF from a report template described in XML (I think).

XSL-T is a transformation language that takes XML as input and creates output based on that (possibly again XML, or HTML, or something else). XSL-FO (which is not the same as XSL-T) does something similar specifically for layout purposes. It's possible that JasperReports uses XSL-T or XSL-FO internally, but that's just a guess.

[satya anvesh]

Hi

I have the same question. We are planning to migrate from XSL-FO to Jasper Reports. We are using XSL-FO for generating reports of 15000 vehicles. Each report generation involves many queries to the database. Currently its taking around 14-15 hrs to complete the task, which means for each vehicle its taking around 5sec to generate around 4-6 pages. Can anyone please suggest will Jasper Report perform better than XSL-FO? we have even pictures of vehicles which will be displayed in the reports, so will this be supported by Jasper Reports?

Or is there any newer technology available?

Thank you for your responses.

Anvesh

[Paul Clapham]

I would strongly suggest you should try JasperReports to see how well it functions in your environment. I'm sure there isn't a simple numerical ranking for JasperReports and XSL-FO... particularly since there is more than one implementation of XSL-FO. Which brings up the point that you could try a different FO implementation to see if it had better performance.

[satya anvesh]

Hi Paul

Thanks for your reply. But, migration from XSL-FO to JasperReports is a time consuming process as each .xsl file will be around 3500 lines. We have to analyze if it would be better otherwise we can call off the migration process. By the way, is there any way we can convert the .xsl schema or is there any other easier way to migrate rather than manually editing the files. Thanks in advance.

Anvesh

[Paul Clapham]

Well, yes. That's just part of your project to determine whether you should switch. You do of course have to evaluate all of the costs and benefits. (And those costs and benefits are very specific to your environment.)

If you are considering the switch, then you should at least pick one of your transformations as a test case. That will then tell you how long it takes to convert one of your XSL files as well, which is another thing you need to know. Your two questions are:

How much will it cost me to convert?

What are the benefits if I do convert?

And then you have to compare those two things and see whether the second exceeds the first.

As to whether there exists an XSL-FO to JasperReports translator, have you looked? A general Internet search for a start, then a closer look at the JasperReports site would be my recommendation.

[satya anvesh]

Thanks for your valuable suggestion Paul, it helped me a lot.

Regarding conversion of .xsl file to .jrxml does anyone know the easiest and best way to achieve?

I have searched in the Internet but I could not find any approach.

Thanks in advance.