The Pentaho Report Designer
The Pentaho Report Designer is a desktop application that provides a visual design environment to create report definitions. It is geared towards experienced and power users, who are familiar with the concepts and data-sources used.The PRD can also be used to execute existing reports locally to save the generated content to the disk without the need for any servers.
The Pentaho Reporting Engine
The Pentaho Reporting Engine is a embeddable Java reporting library that is used by the report designer to generate reports. The library can be used in both in server-side and client side scenarios.A good way to get started with the API is to download the Pentaho Reporting SDK, which bundles the most commonly used components with four well documented examples on how to run reports.
If you need a deeper coverage of the reporting API, I heartily recommend Will Gorman's book "Pentaho Reporting 3.5 for Java developers", which is fully valid for all releases from 3.5.0 to 3.7.0.
The minium deployment you need to embed Pentaho Reporting is the "classic-engine-core" and all its dependencies. To make use of more datasources and features like the charting and barcodes, you will have to deploy additional modules.
How do I get the required libraries?
After downloading the zip or tar.gz file you will find all required libraries in the "lib" directory. If you want to download the libraries yourself, you can use our bundled "ant" script that downloads the correct versions of the libraries used from the public repositories on the internet.How do I get the source code for all the libraries?
The source code for all libraries that Pentaho Provides can be found in the Pentaho SVN at svn://source.pentaho.org/The source code for all third party libraries can be found at the respective project pages of the library.
