Consider to take look on http://intive-fdv.github.io/DynamicJasper/ It is more code friendly Jasper wrapper to provide reports. Plain jasper is very XML heavy and you will end in wrapping it in some template engine at some point to reduce repetition. Otherwise download the Jasper Report studio crate simple reports and play around. There are maven and gradle build plugins that compile reports during the build and then you can work with compiled versions.

Jasper by itself is not a bad technology and work quite good for designing reports.