Lucian. I've started a small project to help programmer developer reports. it consist to determine, by a class configurator, the field avaiable in report. After it, a datasource is associated with the report and each Bean of the List can be conected to the field set definition. At this way, isn't needed to implement XML, because the report is simple, as a template. 1) You tell the fields you want in report; 2) customize each field, if needed (Sum, Total, Count, Alignment, Pattern, etc); 3) Associate the datasource. Ready. It makes sense for many simple report. I recently did it at my work and now I'm doing a version more powerful and consistence. I tried publish a new project at jasperforge (I don't know it its ok), but if you have interest, contact me. It will be available under GPL.