Jasper Vs MS Reporting Services

Before anyone calls me MS spy, let me say I'm a big open source fan and had become very excited about Jasper Reports at first sight.

I work for a big multinational company and am very familiar to MS reporting Services, in which I have designed and developed several reports of various types. Once heard of Jasper, I have immediately downloaded and started developing onto it. Again, despite being an open source adept, I must say Jasper has become very disappointing to me. Maybe it's still under construction and improvements but the current version can't compare at all to MSRS easiness of use, performance or capability.

And the main reason for that is because MSRS has one powerful feature not present in Jasper: reusable datasets. While in Jasper you must do a query each time you need to build a table, matrix, graph or whatever, MSRS works with the concept of dataset: the query is run only once and then you can reference the result set multiple times in multiple regions. This is the main performance gain between MSRS and Jasper.

For the easiness of use perspective, MSRS allows creation of tables and Matrix much easier than Jasper. Also, while Jasper has a pretty limited and confusing layout option (header, details, etc.), it's possible to build any component at any space into MSRS, which means much more flexible design.

I really want to believe this huge difference between MSRS and Jasper is due to the fact of MSRS have imported most of its capabilities from Crystal Reports and it's much more mature tool. I hope Jasper at some time be able to beat or at least be compared to its major competitor. So far, it can't.