FlexReport vs. Jasper4Flex

I’ve been asked about Jasper4Flex and how it relates to FlexReport. Though both projects share the same purpose, report generation in Flex, the concepts behind them are quite different:

FlexReport is a client-side report generation component. The reports are based on actionscript3/mxml templates which are deployed embeded in the application. FlexReport is also a set of components designed for general-purpose printing in Flex. The communication with the server is only required to retrieve the data.

Jasper4Flex is a parser for Jasper. The reports are generated on the server-side by Jasper, based on templates written in Jasper’s own syntax. They are then parsed by the client.

Which one is better? None! It all depends on your requirements and skills. If you are not confortable with Jasper or you don’t have a Java-enabled server you should go with FlexReport. On the other side, if you have the need to integrate your reports with other applications, Jasper4Flex would have a significant advantage. In terms of performance FlexReport should be faster, since only the data is loaded from the server.

In the end it’s just like apples and oranges, you can’t get much juice from apples and you don’t make pies with oranges!