[davedesh]

Background

Since the birth of Java, it is always connected with all kinds of configuration files. Following the configuration habit of Java, the installation deployments of most pure Java products are troublesome.

As a result, programmers come from other programming language commonly feel unconformable and difficult with the environment configuration of Java.

Difficulties
A Java web reporting tool is often composed of two parts, designer and server. Commonly, they are independent programs.

As an independent tool, the installation deployment of report designer is relatively simple.

It just needs an installation package. However, as it is pure Java, it must depend on Java environment. As user’s computer may have installed a Java environment before, it does not want to install another during the installation of designer. Moreover, the two may be of different versions and conflict. Nevertheless, if you do not install a new one, you have to write a configuration file to configure the installation directory of Java.

As report server is often deployed on J2EE application server, its installation deployment is more complex.

First, publish the report server as a war package. Second, configure the database connection pool. Last, configure according to the requirement of application. For example, RAQ Report needs to configure semantic layer files, authorization files, log files, etc. For application, it needs to configure application directory, port number, etc.

Beside those above, there is another trouble, the joint of designer and server.

As they both run independently, report made by designer needs to be deployed to server, and this makes the development process troublesome. Moreover, you can look over report in web page only after deployment. As a result, users have to establish the web page framework on server first. After that, they can design report and look over the display effect. This increases the difficulty of fast usage experience.

Solution

As a pure Java web reporting tool, RAQ Report gives a more perfect solution to installation package for users’ convenience. The main advantages of it are as follows:

1. Integrate report designer and server. Users need not to develop any server-side program, and they can look over the report made in designer in web page directly. This makes fast experience easy for users.

2. Being saved, designed report can be deployed to the application of server directly. This increases the development speed by avoiding secondary deployment.

3. After designing, it can generate a war package for deployment directly. During the generation process, users can configure a series of application parameters with a friendly interface. Such as semantic layer files, authorization files, log files, etc.

4. The report designer supports simultaneous development of several applications and it can start/stop several applications simultaneously. As it has a plugin menu for all the applications, users can click corresponding buttons easily. This helps users with less development experience of Web applications a lot.

Graphic Illustration






This post is from freezea's blog.

[tomasr@windward.net]

Report design is so time consuming! That's why we created the Windward Report Engine. Companies need a powerful, secure enterprise-level Java/J2EE reporting engine to back their critical reporting and document generation systems.

The Windward Engine installs easily, runs on one or more servers as part of your server-based application, and can easily produce hundreds of thousands of reports per day on a single server. The server is a pure Java product (and also is available as pure .NET).

Even better news for you guys: When combined with the Windward report design tools AutoTag and AutoTag Max, users design, schedule and run reports from within Microsoft Office. That means you can turn over reporting to the business group and get back to more interesting work.

You don't have to take my word for it. Check out this robust Java reporting engine for yourself.

[tomasr@windward.net]

By the way, since many of our customers also need a document management system, we created Arrow 3.0. SharePoint users need powerful reporting, document generation or B.I. systems that SharePoint alone doesn't provide. With Arrow 3.0 for SharePoint, users now have those capabilities.

Even better news for you guys: Arrow users design reports, documents or dashboards in Microsoft Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and they can schedule and run reports from within SharePoint. That means you can turn over reporting to the business group and get back to more interesting work.

You don't have to take my word for it. Check out this SharePoint reporting system for yourself.