JasperReports: Quickly generate and customize reports

For a small company I had created an Oracle APEX application. They wanted to create reports from an underlying database (in order to send invoices). Oracle APEX has the option of creating interactive reports (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/developer-tools/apex/application-express/irrs-083031.html). These reports can be exported to several formats (e.g. CSV, PDF, HTML).

The customer is a small company so commercial products were not an option. The customer wanted to customize/layout the generated reports. The time available to develop a solution was very limited. After development, the customer needed to be able to make small layout changes independent of the developer (since the developer had other things to do). I first looked at the standard APEX Apache FOP implementation. Then I decided to take a look at JasperReports. The below image displays a report which was created in just a couple of minutes based on data from the sample HR schema present in most Oracle databases.