Business Intelligence tools

[BlackDragon]

Hi,

I'm currently researching Business Intelligence tools to integrate into a web application, and must do the following:

• Run on Linux
• Produce reports (PDF, or some other format)
• Interactive reports that lets users drill down in various dimensions of data This needs to be embeddable in a Java web application
• Reports need to look good

The ones I am aware of are BIRT, JasperReports, and Pentaho. BIRT seems good and was easy to use, but doesn't look as flashy.

JasperReports seems to be a nightmare to actually get running as the plugins to NetBeans and Eclipse either don't work very well, or is very unintuitive, and documentation for newbies is almost non-existent.

Pentaho I've only just encountered and haven't had a chance to play around.

Appreciate it if anyone can offer any recommendations.

 

[RobH]

I've used Jasper Reports quite a bit, you will want to be using iReport to design your reports. The plugin for NetBeans is quite dated and the Eclipse version is still under development and not yet feature complete compared to iReport. It's a bit of a beast though, iReport itself has quite a few quirks and you only find them out through using it over a long period of time. As you mentioned, there is also very limited documentation, you need to pay to get the ultimate guide written by the author of Jasper Reports. All that said, it can be quite powerful, especially when you get into the crosstab style reports, you can get some nice looking reports. It just requires an investment in time to learn about it, in terms of interactive reports I can't really comment, there is some information about it on their site but I've never used the feature.