Programming

I last used it a good while ago (like, 10yrs?), so you'll have to verify how what I am about to say applies to current versions (it probably does).

Jasper is an old-school, enterprisey tool similar to Crystal Reports that attempts to give you a WYSIWYG editor for building your reports.

All in all, I'd say that it might be good if you have a reporting department full of people that only do reports and you don't want to train as programmers. If the ones doing the reports are gonna be actual programmers, they'll be much better off generating html/latex/whatever and converting that to pdf.

Consider to take look on http://intive-fdv.github.io/DynamicJasper/ It is more code friendly Jasper wrapper to provide reports. Plain jasper is very XML heavy and you will end in wrapping it in some template engine at some point to reduce repetition. Otherwise download the Jasper Report studio crate simple reports and play around. There are maven and gradle build plugins that compile reports during the build and then you can work with compiled versions.

Jasper by itself is not a bad technology and work quite good for designing reports.

In a previous job we had a tool where you could export data to PDFs using JasperSoft. There's JasperSoft Studio to design these reports. It's basically drag&drop of the different types of boxes and fields onto your virtual page, give them the right names and the application will then fill in these boxes and fields and generate your PDF.

Thats a name I haven't heard in a loooong time.

I remember hooking into the API: https://community.jaspersoft.com/knowledgebase/getting-started/getting-started-rest-web-service-api/

Its a good place to start after you build a couple of reports.