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I mostly work in the server side but I have developed desktop apps in Swing.
I want to make a "fat" desktop application for management of a small office that needs to incorporate the ability to print and display neet reports from data from a Database.
My question is the following:
I have read that BIRT is the way to go when it comes to reporting, but it is not clear to me if I can integrate it in a swing application so that I can reuse my knowledege.
So if it is not possible and have to invest time to other technology what should I go for?
RCP or GWT or what? (I only know Swing. No other client side UI framework)
I hope that my question is clear.

Cratylus
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1 Answers1

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For reporting, I would choose JasperReports from JasperSoft. It has an open source community version and commercial support is available. They have a visual report designer as well.

If one of the purposes of the reports is to be printed, the best option is to have a PDF version of the report. In that case, I'm not sure why you don't go with a web site that displays HTML reports and offers PDF-download links for printing.

Of course you can do that in a Swing application as well. For displaying a Jasper report in a Swing application see this question.

Community
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Ingo Kegel
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  • So you think it should be better to look into a web client instead? – Cratylus Sep 12 '11 at 14:42
  • If that's what you know best, then yes. – Ingo Kegel Sep 12 '11 at 14:55
  • Well, the problem is that the application is not that big as far as the expectations/requirements are concerned.Small data and the biggest thing is the reporting.So I am trying to do something minimal so that the installation is minimal.I.e. I use Jetty as embedded and not Tomcat, so no web app deployment just HTTP/XML process and store in the DB. Not sure if the HTML reports (since the report is what is expected) will be better than a full fledged framework like `jasper` that you propose. – Cratylus Sep 12 '11 at 15:16
  • I was proposing to use jasper for the web client, too. But if you're bundling the web container, you could just as well write a Swing application. – Ingo Kegel Sep 12 '11 at 15:40