Summary:
JReport from Jinfonet excels in embeddable reporting and data visualisation. JReport is used by some of the world’s largest businesses such as Visa, IBM, and Target, typically to provide online reporting facilities to customers, but is also used in many businesses to provide information directly to employees and partners. At the current time, around two thirds of Jinfonet’s business comes from OEM, ISVs and other third parties who provide embedded intelligence in a variety of services and products. JReport supports dashboards, charts, data analysis reporting, and connects to a wide variety of data sources, including big data, relational databases and cloud based data.
Business Application
Some very large businesses use JReport to provide intelligence to customers. One of these is a major credit card company whose customers access embedded reports and visuals built in JReport. Another application is to be found in a well known video collaboration service, with business intelligence provided to customers through JReport.
Technology
JReport addresses the needs of application developers who wish to embed intelligence in applications, report developers who design reports and visualisations, power users who need ad-hoc querying and regular report scheduling, and business users who want to directly construct dashboards and other visuals. Metadata management features strongly in its capabilities, creating a catalogue of resources which business and other users can employ to create their own reports and visualisations. Ad-hoc reporting supports filters, sorting, drilling, expanding and contracting groups, and the emulation of OLAP capabilities in its own in-memory cubes. Ad-hoc analysis presents dimensions and measures used in visual analytics, and the drag-and-drop interface provides a productive easy-to-use environment.
JReport Mobile provides native apps for mobile access and there are plans to enable report and visualisation creation on mobile platforms. Big data sources (MongoDB, Hortonworks etc.) are typically accessed through Apache Hive and Drill, and JReport provides direct support for HP Vertica. While there is no direct support for OLAP databases, OLAP functionality is provided by in-memory cubes. Joins across distributed data sources are easily implemented.
JReport servers are highly scalable with no server hierarchy, they can also be implemented in virtual as well as physical server environments.
The main components of JReport include:
- JReport Designer supports a productive (via wizards and previews) report design environment. CSS style support is also available allowing style sheets to be used at run time.
- JReport Server Live allows ad-hoc reports to be built by business users. This self-service facility provides a step-by-step approach to the creation of both simple and complex reports.
- JDashboard provides a drag and drop dashboard creation facility with support for many types of charts, tables, crosstabs and other components. Filters, drill down, trend analysis and so on are supported.
More recently JReport provided Geo-analysis capability with drill down and up, and the ability to customise map markers and areas.
About
Jinfonet was founded in 1998, and is a rapidly growing, privately held business that is headquartered in Rockville, Maryland, USA.