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A Brief History of Crystal Web Development

When Crystal Reports was first released, the Internet was still in its infancy and Crystal Reports has grown right along beside it. With the introduction of a web component in Crystal Reports 7.0, based on the print engine already in use with its Windows development tools, developers were able to integrate reporting into their own web applications through the use of ASP. This first implementation of web reporting provided a powerful tool for web developers and enabled a whole new class of reporting applications for the web.

It wasn't long before web developers started pushing Crystal Reports on the web to its limit. While version 7.0 of Crystal Reports provided a web engine that was suitable for small workgroup applications of 5-10 users, it lacked the power to handle the first of many large enterprise web applications that were being developed at the time.

A companion product, Seagate Info (formerly Crystal Info) was also introduced utilizing a similar framework, but adding multi-tier processing to the architecture, enabling reports to be processed on a separate machine and then viewed by the user. Unfortunately, customizing the Seagate Info user interface, or creating custom apps that accessed this technology, proved to be cumbersome, so it really didn't take off with developers.

With the release of version 8.0, the reporting technology took another massive leap forward, but some of the same limitations persisted (such as scalability and security) until the advent of Crystal Reports 8.5 and the introduction of Crystal Enterprise 8.5. Leveraging the architecture and code base from Seagate Info, Crystal Enterprise provides a robust application framework that developers can use to create applications that can be scaled from one to ten to ten thousand users and beyond.

So where does that leave you, the Crystal Reports.NET developer? Well, to start, you don't need to buy any additional tools or licenses to integrate reporting into your web applications - Crystal Reports.NET provides all of the tools you need to create web-based workgroup applications.

Note

To deploy applications beyond a workgroup implementation of 5-10 users to a large number of users you will need to purchase an additional license from Crystal Decisions. Also, if you need to offload processing in a true n-tier application or want to schedule or redistribute reports, you may want to consider moving your application to Crystal Enterprise (covered in Chapter 9).

The other great news is that Crystal Reports.NET builds on the web functionality found in previous products and provides a feature-rich development environment and a rich user experience for viewing reports on the web. If you haven't looked at the Crystal Reports web technology in a while, you are going to be pleasantly surprised.