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An Eclipse based designer for JasperReports is something we had in mind for a long time at Jaspersoft. The experience of porting iReport on the NetBeans platform has been a great success (iReport is the #1 plugin for NetBeans IDE). The initial port took almost an year and today, after two years from the first alpha release, with its millions of users iReport represents the best designer for JasperReports.

Jaspersoft Studio is able to handle a wide variety of measure units including pixels, centimeters and inches, so each time you create a new report, you can set its margins flawless, according with your needs. In case you want to connect to a specific SQL database, you are required to select the data adapter in order to define the layout of the report before connecting it to a data source - then let the query to explore and insert all the proper fields to the reports. You will notice that all the editors, views and tabs will display the corresponding data. When you launch the program for the first time, you are required to set the workspace where all your projects and default settings will be saved. Once the directory has been selected, a new workbench window will then appear that offers one or more perspective. By default, you can work using the Java perspective, but you can switch between ‘CV Repository Exploring’, ‘Report Design’, ‘Team Synchronizing’ or ‘Resource’.

This first milestone is just the beginning of where we want to go. But our idea of open source is that sharing what we are doing is the best way to reach perfection.