I need some advice on whether FlexReport is ready for "real" use.
I've already taken a look at it some, and other than it being a pain to setup and rather slow, I think it may work well enough. But I want to get some 3rd party opinions on others who have used it-- or, what other solutions have you come up with? Are most people just using 3rd party tools like Oracle BI Publisher or Crystal Reports, resorting to that primitive "HTML round-trip" stuff? ^_^ I also would like to provide users with report building capabilities. I know reporting is complex, but has anyone done anything similiar or had any experience creating a report builder in Flex? Something like ClearBI would be great. (Unfortunately ClearBI has no user base, no support, no community, extremely restrictive setup requirements, is almost impossible to setup and get working, isn't cheap (considering what you're getting), and seems like a VERY risky choice for reporting.) As a side rant... Flex is not going to take off in an "enterprise environment" as Adobe seems to be claiming it is ready for until we can do reporting natively in the swf app, without a ton of issues and work to do. I don't care whether it's built into Flex, created separately by Adobe, or built by a third party, but a real solution is going to be needed very soon, before something like Silverlight exploits this weakness. FlexReport won't be this solution no matter how good it gets, because it's scope isn't large enough. Users need to be able to create their own reports using the reporting interface!
