Java Crystal Viewer, Reporting Tools: Crystal Reports XI is the definitive “out of the box� reporting technology for use in J2EE applications. It allows developers to create rich, dynamic applications and delivers highly-interactive, professional-looking reports to the end-user. It does all of this and requires developers to write little or no additional code. Crystal Reports XI supplies developers with access to heterogeneous systems through a wide array of data source options.

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Data. If you stop to think about it, data forms the major component of everything computers do. Storing data, consuming data, running algorithms over data to try to predict the weather, or consumers' buying habits, or even what this month's profits will be, everything a computer touches is data of one form or another.

Users form the other major component of everything computers do. And, unfortunately, users have a hard time consuming data in its raw form. Ones and zeroes may mean a great deal to the computer, but the average human being has a difficult time making sense of 00100110 (as opposed to last month’s 01001100).

The hard part about programming isn‘t bringing data to users- we can do that without much difficulty at all, simply by using the "cat" or "type" command on your favorite data file at the command shell or DOS prompt. Bringing data to users in a form that they can swallow without choking, that’s the hard part.

Presenting data to users in an easy-to-swallow format is the province of reporting.

Why use Reporting Technology?

Developers spend a great deal of time building applications to coalesce data into forms that can bed easily stored on disk for future processing, or displaying data to users as part of existing business processes. In fact, it’s a fair statement to say that developers spend a great deal of time just on the algorithms and business procedures themselves, much less the presentation of that data to the users. The desire to minimize the amount of time developers have to spend working on applications has been the driving factor behind every major new language, platform, or other development technology in the last twenty years.

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