A few days ago the iReport Team announced the new 5.5.0 iReport release. With it comes the latest iReport plugin for NetBeans IDE 7.4. The NetBeans iReport plugin is by FAR the most downloaded plugin on the NetBeans Plugin Portal. Here's a direct link to it:

http://plugins.netbeans.org/plugin/4425/ireport

I installed the plugin into NetBeans IDE 7.4 today and made this small (and silent) movie of the main cool features I found. Sorry it's a bit blurry, comes from conversion from MPEG to AVI.

Many thanks to Giulio Toffoli from Jaspersoft for continually enhancing the plugin from release to release, it's really awesome, provides a massive bunch of reporting features, fully justifying the popularity of this plugin.

Some documents, more or less up to date, that should help, after following the screencast above:

http://community.jaspersoft.com/wiki/designing-report

http://community.jaspersoft.com/project/ireport-designer/resources

Also, note that YouTube is pretty much flooded with movies on NetBeans and iReport:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ireport+netbeans&search_sort=video_date_uploaded