There’s another way if you don’t want to have older Java versions installed you can do the following:
1) Download the iReport-5.6.0.zip from https://sourceforge.net/projects/ireport/files/iReport/iReport-5.6.0/
2) Download jre-7u67-windows-x64.tar.gz (the one packed in a tar) from https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/java-archive-downloads-javase7-521261.html
3) Extract the iReport and in the extracted folder that contains the bin and etc folders throw in the jre. For example if you unpack twice the jre-7u67-windows-x64.tar.gz you end up with a folder named jre1.7.0_67. Put that folder in the iReport-5.6.0 directory:
and then go into the etc folder and edit the file ireport.conf and add the following line into it:
For Windows
jdkhome=”.\jre1.7.0_67″
For Linux
jdkhome=”./jre1.7.0_67″
Note : jre version may change! according to your download of 1.7
now if you run the ireport_w.exe from the bin folder in the iReport directory it should load just fine.