[Phpwm] Reporting Systems

[Ian Munday]

I am wondering what experience people have of integrating a reporting  
system into a PHP web application...?

I built my own reporting library a few years ago which has been used  
in a couple of web applications, but it is a bit of a pain to  
maintain.  It is configured using hand-coded XML files and outputs to  
HTML, PDF and XLS with varying degrees of success (i.e. some reports  
work ok in one format, but not so well in another).

Due to the maintenance headache of maintaining my own library, the  
time-consuming hand-coding (with a fair bit of trial and error)  
required to produce new reports / tweak existing reports, and the  
sometimes imperfect and inconsistent output across different formats,  
I'm looking to replace it my current framework.  Whatever I replace  
it with must include output to HTML, PDF and XLS.

The two options I'm considering are BIRT (http://www.eclipse.org/ 
birt/) and JasperReports (http://jasperforge.org/sf/projects/ 
jasperreports).  I *must* be able to use it from PHP (something I see  
documentation on on the BIRT website).

Has anyone any experience of these (or others)?  Any  
recommendations / tips / pitfalls welcomed.

Regards,

Ian


----
Ian Munday
Illumen Ltd.
www.illumen.co.uk

Tel:  0121 703 3111  /  0845 00 999 00
Email:  ian.munday at illumen.co.uk
Skype:  ian.munday