The complete list of reporting software - Part 1

Often organizations find it difficult to execute a software selection. Choosing and selecting a reporting software can be a complicated task sometimes. In this article and the following one I will give you a list of reporting software applications. I hope that this will help you find the best suited reporting software for your company’s needs.
A trend is starting to develop amongst Business Intelligence vendors and developers and that is the open source trend. To open source a piece of software usually means that the market for that type of software is saturated. Even if I don’t entirely agree with that statement, it appears that some vendors think that the reporting software market has reached a point where some of the software applications should become open source. Next I‘ll enclose a list of the open source reporting softwares:

Open source reporting software:

• Eclipse BIRT Project

BIRT Project stands for Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project. It is an open source software that provides reporting and BI capabilities for rich clients. It also provides some web applications, most of them based on Java and Java EE. The BIRT Project is using a wide range of reporting software within a single application, ranging from operational reporting to OLAP. It has two main components: a reports designer and a runtime component for generating reports. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used as a standalone to integrate charts into an application.
BIRT Report designs are persisted as XML and can access a number of different data sources including SQL databases, JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs, XML and Web Services.

• GNU Enterprise

GNU is a set of tools. It contains tools such as data-aware user interface, a reporting system and an application server. GNUe supports multi language interfaces, non-ASCII character sets and is compatible with most popular database systems.
GNUe is also a set of packages written using the tools that can be used to implement a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Packages include:
-human resources
-accounting
-customer relationship management
-project management
-supply chain
-e-commerce

• JasperReports

This is a reporting tool that can write to a variety of targets like PDF, HTML, Excel, RTF, ODT, Comma-separated values or XML files. It can be used in Java applications, including Java EE or web applications to generate content.
Many prominent Java IDEs provide instructions for users wishing to integrate JasperReports into a project.
-NetBeans

• iReport - a visual designer for JasperReports

-Eclipse

• Jaspersoft Studio - a re-write of iReport by the same team who originally developed iReport, backed by Jaspersoft
• JasperWave Report Designer - free Eclipse-based visual editor for JasperReports report engine

-IBM Websphere Studio Application Developer

• Pentaho

Pentaho or Pentaho BI Suite, contains several software targets applications combined in a suite. Reporting, dashboard, data-mining, workflow and ETL capabilities are combined in a single software application.
Pentaho uses a subscription model. Pentaho, under subscription model, provides support, services, and product enhancements for an annual subscription. As a commercial open source company, Pentaho "leads and sponsors" the open source projects that are core to its suite, giving it direct influence over software development.
Pentaho community version is licensed under Mozilla Public License version 1.1. Pentaho Enterprise versions are available under a commercial license. There are three variants of enterprise versions: Basic, Professional and Enterprise.

There are several reporting tools that I would like to “play” with. Tools that I would like  to be available open source. But now I won’t give any examples because in the next articles I will present you with a list of reporting software applications for commercial use. Some of them are free, but their source code is not available, so they are not exactly open source.