Don't buy the PDF book!

[2001 JI Open Discussion]

By: SVandenbussche - svandenbussche

Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 03:00

I just bought the "Jasperreoprts Ultimate Guide" PDF.

Aside a couple of hints, this "book" (only 69 pages!) is mainly about creating and organizing reports. Useless.

I was expecting explanations about Jasperreport's inner workings. Especially the class generation and the proprietary classloader. How foolish I was to expect it would *save* me some precious time. But no, now I have to search through the source-code myself. What a waste!

 

 

 

By: David Lim - aberrant80

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 03:23

I'd support that.

 

While I really really appreciate the work and effort that's gone into the JasperReports library, I think some effort should be diverted to updating the PDF and actually putting in something inside the javadocs.

 

 

By: Brett - bsutton

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 04:37

Actually looking at the spacing of the source code, I'm prepared to bet that the comments have been intentionally stripped!

 

And you're right, the pdf isn't worth the money, unless you consider it a donation to support the development effort.

 

 

By: Alexander Wallace - aows

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 07:32

You guys are geting a tremendous api for free. The pdf is not made to do the work for you. It tells you what jasper reports is capable off, but it will not teach you how to program. The book is a good introduction and a summary of the most common usese. The book is also a way to support the developer who created the api. You have all the source code available, you can see how things are being done... You just don't realize how much you are getting with the api, the book and the source code... just sound like someone that wants to get all this spoonfed

 

 

By: John Armstrong - siberian1967

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 07:39

I found the PDF useful to get up and running a bit quicker. It was not walk in the park but it did have value.

 

Also, the purchase supports JasperReports which is great. We find this an invaluable tool so doing a little something for the project cash wise is money well spent.

 

Publically telling people 'dont buy the pdf' is a bit ridiculous. Request that it be updated, make some suggestions for that update but outright discouraging it is an affront to the developers and dangerous to the project.

 

Unless you guys are contributing and maintaining? Oh no, that would take time and effort! :)

 

 

 

 

 

 

By: Andreas Mitterer - mitterea

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 07:43

I appreciate the work of the JR team and I'm glad that there are people who dedicate their time to such great open source projects.

 

But, aows, what is so "tremendous" about that api? I can generate it by myself out of the source code which would take a few minutes.

There are no inline comments in the source which makes it hard for me to understand it.

 

 

By: SVandenbussche - svandenbussche

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 09:19

People,

 

The price of the "book" is not a donation, it's simply the price you pay for an information that is missing: why else has the javadoc been stripped from the sourcecode if it's not to force you to buy that "book"? (and no Alexander Wallace, I don't need that book to learn how to code, that I learend more than 10 years ago)

 

All major open-source projects (e.g. Struts) provide javadoc, why would this projects be different?

This "book" is nothing more than a product you get as a result of a purchase, not something you get for free because you donated (nonsense).

 

The reason that makes me upset is that I payed for information, but the information is still missing: still no javadoc and the PDF is not filling that gap!

 

If this code was so perfect that I could integrate it into production with closed eyes, I would not need the javadoc at all, I would not need the sourcecode and I would not need to patch it!

 

John Armstrong: I do contribute to open-source projects, but I can't contribute to all of them all the time.

 

I still don't recommend buying this book to anyone looking for information, unless you're a beginner or unless you simply want to donate money.

 

 

 

By: Gregory A. Swarthout - gswarthout

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-25 09:52

Two years ago, when I purchased the PDF, it was a great resource for learning how to design reports with JasperReports. It still gets referred to on occasion about uncommon features. However, it is now woefully out-of-date and doesn't mention and feature that has been added in the last couple of years.

 

If it were to be updated to the current spec, I'm sure many would find it useful.

 

 

By: John Armstrong - siberian1967

Just dont see the point

2005-01-25 09:24

Don't see your point in sabotaging the developers small income stream from this. Other then ranting it really doesn't help.

 

Drop Teodor a private email with some suggestions but discouraging anyone from contributing just doesn't make any sense.

 

It all comes down to a community effort. I don't have time to contribute and the PDF helped me get over a few conceptual hurdles and bonus, I got to drop a tiny bit of cash into the pot.

 

Fact is, Jasper has a fairly intense learning curve but once you get it going its great, even in production systems :)

 

The lack of documentation outside the PDF is annoying but I am sure Teodor will incorporate the docs of anyone who wishes to write them, are you volunteering?

 

If you are interested I have some great sites that helped me in addition to the PDF and can post them for you.

 

Constructive criticism and contribution is highly encouraging, I am not an apologist for the lack of docs or the PDF contents but just crying about how bad they are is just, well, not constructive.

 

But I bet you feel better for it :)

 

 

 

 

By: SVandenbussche - svandenbussche

RE: Just dont see the point

2005-01-26 12:13

I disagree, Jasper 0.5.3 was causing problems to one of my customers on a legacy application in production mode.

My job is to assist them in solving these problems.

 

Their main problem was that they moved the Jasper jar file inside a another jar file (alljars.jar) which is contained in the application's ear file. Since then, Jasper became unable to compile any report anymore (ClassNotFoundException on JRDefaultCompiler).

I didn't have 2 weeks to solve this issue, I only had a couple of hours.

 

As it turns out, Jasper cannot be used AS IS in production mode simply because dynamically generating and compiling classes is not acceptable in terms of performance. That's the first reason.

The second reason is that applications are sometimes packaged matroska style in multiple jar/war/ear files (third party jars included). In that case Jasper gets lost in its classpath calculations somehow, when trying to instanciate its own Java compiler wrapper classes (ClassNotFoundException on JRDefaultCompiler).

 

Of course, generating the report files once and for all (using Ant or Maven), adding them to the rest of the application's source code and loading the .jasper files should do the trick. But that doesn't work "out of the box" simply because Jasper doesn't generate any package declaration in the Java files, even though the application is package based. Adding the package declaration manually is out of the question because the project has over 2000+ report files, and you don't want to do it all over again with the next generation.

 

There, you're stuck. The only thing left you can do is modify Jasper's behaviour. That's the point where you start missing the javadoc.

Since it's not provided and you're in a damn hurry, you say to yourself "hey, it has to be in that book". So you drawn your company's credit card and buy the damn thing which turns out to be useless. Triple damn! No javadoc and nothing in that book.

 

At this point it looks like solving this problem will take much longer than expected.

Fortunatly it doesn't, it just takes a little longer (the lucky bastard I am)!

 

The solution consists of finding and patching at least 2 classes: JRAntCompileTask to make it accept an extra attribute that tells Jasper to generate package declarations, and JRClassGenerator to make it generate the package declaration if specified.

Then of course, modify the automated build to add the Jasper taskdef and target, integrate the generated files and make the application load the .jasper files instead of the .xml files, repackaging and redeploying the application, running the testcases and that's it.

 

Voila, that was my two cent personal contribution to this project after business hours ;)

 

Back to my non-constructive criticism:

It was not my company's intention to donate any money to this project simply because we're not using it. This was a one-time problem solving contract for one particular customer. When you're working for a business you need info fast and buying books is generally a safe bet. As it turns out, not so with this "Ultimate Guide". We probably wouldn't have bought this book if the javadoc had been provided.

 

No matter how you put it, its very clear that the javadoc has been left out on purpose to make poeple buy that book. I think that defeats the whole point of being an open-source project and I think it's a shame. I'm sure people would gladly donate if the author just explicitally asked for it instead of using this cheap trick. My company doesn't care about the price of the book/donation, if that's the price to pay for good info, we pay it. It cares about the time that's been wasted because the javadoc is missing and why it is missing. In that sense: "what a waste!".

 

 

 

By: Doug Berkland - berkland

RE: Just dont see the point

2005-01-26 12:46

I read the book and got from it that you should compile to jasper files then load as a resource. When it loads as a resource, they jasper files can be in a jar with a path/package and you don't have to change anything in JR. If you had a problem, why didn't you avail yourself of this forum? OH yeah you were able to solve it quickly without help... what's the problem again?

 

 

By: SVandenbussche - svandenbussche

RE: Just dont see the point

2005-01-27 00:50

whatever man

 

 

By: Alexander Wallace - aows

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-26 06:42

Have you looked at the docs/api subfolder in the jasperreports distribution?

 

 

By: Brett - bsutton

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-26 19:51

I have no problems in supporting the author via purchasing the PDF, but I do expect it to provide some value for money, otherwise the author should just ask for a donation. As it stand the PDF IMO is not good value for money.

 

I do have to say that stripping comments from the source code (if this is infact happening) is not in the spirit of the open source community.

 

IMO open and constructive critisim is also part of what open source is about and these type of conversation need to happen.

 

Jasper is a great product but its one great weakness is the lack of documenation. This is a combination of the lack of any commments in the source code and the poor quality of the published documentation such as the PDF as well as the limited examples.

 

 

 

By: Teodor Danciu - teodord

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-01-27 16:25

 

Hi, All,

 

Sorry to arrive in this discussion so late.

I have not received message forwards from the

sourceforge.net forums this week

(not sure why, sourceforge.net problem?)

and all seemed to me so quiet.

 

I agree that the guide is now old and it has to be

updated soon as well as the JavaDocs.

 

As a first step, I'll temporarily suspend the sales

of the guide until the new version will be available.

Some of the existing content of the guide will be

transferred to the freely available documentation.

 

Thank you,

Teodor

 

 

 

By: Brett - bsutton

RE: Don't buy the PDF book!

2005-02-02 17:16

Does this mean that you are going to replace the missing source comments?

 

I think I speak correctly in saying that this would be greatly appreciated by all of the community.