Report generation

Question

I am writing a web app using TurboGears, and in that app the users must be able to generate different reports. The data the reports need is stored in a database (MySQL). The reports must be returned either as a easily printable html document, or a pdf file.

I have previously used jasper and iReport for creating the documents, but if I can avoid having to fire up Java to create the report I would be happy.

Ideally I would like to specify reports in a easily readable markup language and then just feed the template data with some kind of library that produces the report.

I gladly accept any kind of hints on how I should go about generating these reports!

Answer 1

A partial answer: the easily readable format you are looking for might be DocBook. From there it is very easy to go to PDF, html, RTF, etc. etc.

Answer 2

You can build some fancy PDFs from Python with the ReportLab toolkit.

Answer 3

Pod is my favorite solution to your problem.