The Low-Cost Solution for Serving Crystal Reports from a Java Server

usiness Object's Crystal Reports platform has been the industry leader for report generation and formatting for many years now. While Business Objects provides Web-based delivery platforms for Crystal, the cost-prohibitive licensing leads many businesses to settle for deploying these reports as standalone documents that require a Crystal Reports viewer. However, Crystal's Java Reporting Component (JRC) library offers a cheaper solution: deploying Crystal Reports as a component on an open source Java Web server (Tomcat, JBoss, etc.).

This article demonstrates how to implement this JRC solution within a standard Java Web application WAR. The deployed reports will provide real-time visibility into data contained within a JDBC-compliant datastore. All you need is a proficiency in Java Web development, prior experience developing reports with Crystal Reports, and a Crystal Reports version that supports the JRC.