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ReportBuilder 22.06 now available including Delphi 12.2 support!
New Blog Posts: Merging Reports - Part 1 and Part 2

Which reporting tool is best?

nardmoseleynardmoseley
edited April 2003 in General

This is the title of a thread on the
borland.public.delphi.reporting-charting newsgroup.

Please feel free to let others know that they should be using ReportBuilder!
:)


--
Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
http://www.digital-metaphors.com

Best regards,

Nard Moseley
Digital Metaphors
www.digital-metaphors.com

Comments

  • rbuserrbuser
    edited April 2003
    Hello Nard,

    There is another thread, not so obvious this one,
    on b.p.d.nontech "C# reality check 2".

    Somehow this thread has become side-tracked into attacking
    Crystal Reports, and implicitly praising ReportBuilder.

    Evidently, all Borland's efforts right now are going into Delphi
    for dotNET, and IMHO soon Delphi notNet will become a
    legacy product (this is IMHO only, not fact).

    I notice that DevExpress, makers of ExpressQuantumGrid,
    have versions for dotNET already.

    Do you have more info about your plans for dotNET?
    Last post I found was 2003-01-15, saying you are awaiting
    release of Delphi for dotNet. But the great thing about dotNet
    is that it is language neutral, so C#, VB, Delphi, C++, et al, will all
    compile down to a CLR. So unlike before, where each sector
    had its own component sets, in theory 3rd party components
    can now be used by all languages! This could be a breakthrough
    opportunity for ReportBuilder. It also means you should not
    need to wait for Delphi dotNET to start work on this.

    (One place to really think hard is the RAP language. I use it, it
    is great, but IMHO it would have been better if you had
    exposed RB objects by means of the COM object model,
    rather than Delphi RTTI. This would allowed any
    COM-compatible scripting language to be used. This will
    be more important for dotNET, where you cannot rely on
    all developers knowing Pascal syntax for RAP.)

    I hope we will see a newly architected ReportBuilder for
    dotNET, building on the best of RB for Delphi, but doing
    things even better, and with the ability to be freely used with
    all the dotNET development tools.

    Regards,
    Edward Benson.


  • rbuserrbuser
    edited April 2003
    I don't really hope as much as many of you that ReportBuilder makes it's way into dotNet. Simply because I don't
    think I'll switch into dotNet until a lot of years from now.

    I am an application developper working for a small business. My team was asked to look into dotNet for
    programming database driven applications the dotNet way. We have encountered lots and lots and of misses in the
    technology. Disconnected database philosophy is one of them. Connect to the database, load everything from the
    database in the application and then disconnect. This is bad for multi-tier application and takes a lot of time
    to load forms when the having a huge amount of data.

    The second problem is Cristal Report. Nothing to say here since the name itself can give nightmare to some of us.

    An other thing is decompilers. We don't sell the source code of our application and the dotNet decompilers are
    very efficient in reproducing code. Mainly because of dotNet uncompiled binaries (IL code). Decompilers like
    Salamander (http://www.remotesoft.com/salamander/) can uncompile code in a scary way for small business like
    mine.

    Even though I'm not hoping for a dotNet version of report builder. It will probably be a good choice for Digital
    Metaphors to do a version of their highly praised reporting tool.

    As for myself, I'll see what the futur brings to us.

    Cheers

    --
    Daniel Lemire
  • rbuserrbuser
    edited April 2003
    Hi,

    Apart from speed, other factors are also important.

    The question in a case like this, ask: Did the product passed the test of
    time? Analogue to this argument: Take the SAS software on the IBM
    mainframes. My first encounter with it was in 1980. Now my daughter, doing
    her Honors degree in Financial Mathematics, is using version 9 of SAS on her
    PC!

    Have a look at the documentation and availability of examples. For this
    reason I did not choose Rave Reports.

    Also have a look if the product is a category winner in Delphi Informant
    magazine (www.delphizine.com). Here ReportBuilder shines.

    Can you use the product in IntraWeb environment. Products like
    PsRBExportDevices from www.pragnaan.com make it possible to use
    ReportBuilder as an IntraWeb reporting tool.

    What about graphics. Does the reporting tool integrates TeeChart or
    TeeChart Pro (ReportBuilder 7.02 accommodates TeeChart or TeeChart Pro v.6)

    The last bit of advice: Have a look at the product's newsgroups: Are the
    requests for advice speedily answered? Also have a look in the newsgroup
    archives (www.tamaracka.com). In the search field, type the product name
    (e.g. on ReportBuilder you will get more than 9660 and on Rave you will get
    more than 6780 hits) and sort the results by date. Then you will get an
    idea of how popular the product is and how quick you will get an answer on
    requested advice.

    My advice: ReportBuilder


    Regards.






This discussion has been closed.