News

Report writer adds Java support

• By Rich Seeley
• August 23, 2002

With Crystal Reports already bundled in Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Crystal Decisions Inc. this week reached out to the Java developer community with the unveiling of a new version of its reporting software.

The new Crystal Reports 9.0 can provide Java developers working on the IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic platforms with the same functionality as the previously released .NET version, said Crystal CTO Tony Wind.

'Crystal Reports has always had strong support for COM and [more recently] for .NET,' Wind told e-ADT. 'With Crystal Reports 9, we've done the same thing for the Java community. We made sure we have a full Java object model.'

He said that while previous versions of Crystal Reports had some support for Java, the new release provides comprehensive support for the language.

'We've had Java report viewers for a long time for [users to] integrate Java report viewing into their apps,' Wind added. 'But we never had a full object model for writing an app for controlling any aspect of a report, defining it and running it.' Along with the increased Java support, the new version adds functionality for Web applications by providing a Report Application Server.

The new version also adds a so-called Report Parts feature, said to give developers the ability to select sections of a report and insert them into a Web page without having to display the entire report. 'This is us really redefining what reporting means to Web apps,' Wind said. 'You used to be able to deploy reports to your apps. But generally they were in their own windows or their own frame, and they were the whole report. In Crystal Reports 9, you can mark any object like a chart, map, number or table, and say this is all I want to embed in my Web app. You can click on it and it's still live. And you can drill into it.'

For more information, click on http://www.crystaldecisions.com/crystalreports.