Report Writer for Linux (XML, PGSQL, PHP, LINUX)

Question

I'm a developer on an open source ERP project, it's web based and as you'd expect we have a requirement to print various reports. We currently use ezPDF but it means having to set a ridiculously high memory limit / execution time, and that is still limiting us to how many reports we can print.

We liked the look of rlib however complications compiling it are making this an increasinly unjustified option, the same could be said for Papyrus. Our ERP application uses PHP and PostgreSQL running on a Ubuntu server (running 10.04 LTS).

Can anyone recommend a report writer that will run on the platform I've described, that takes an XML report definition and connects to a PGSQL database.

Answer 1

I've used BIRT with PHP and there's instructions for using it with PHP.

Answer 2

Right so after a little bit or research we've discovered Apache FOP, of which takes an XML of the data and an XSL for the formatting, this then generates a PDF output, far better than the ezPDF option we were using and quicker too.

We were a bit concerned about going for a Java application as we didn't want the complexities of setting up the Java / PHP bridge, especially if doing a remote installation. However it seems it works well just by passing the values using the exec method.