I don't want to make Crystal Reports bad, but I haven't heard much good from it, although that the last time that was 3 years ago. Things change. At that time I was working for a Delphi-programming company that have written their own Reporter because Crystal Reports was suboptimal.
At the end you'll have to choose the tool that you're most comfortable with. Do the people who have to create the reports like the tool their working with? Does the tool support the things you need to be able to do? One thought I'd like to give you on your way is the one about standards conformance: On one side you need different input and output formats (such as XML, PDF, PostScript). Both FOP and Crystal Reports support a variety of standard input and output formats. But what about the layout style you need to develop for each report, the report itself. Crystal Reports uses its own proprietary format, while FOP uses XSLT, XSL:FO, SVG and other standards to accomplish the same. If you use a standard based tool you have a high probability that you can switch the tool without having to redo each and every report. You may well be able to process your report using RenderX's XEP or the upcoming Adobe server or whatever. What about the editors? With Crystal Reports you get theirs. With XSL you can use "some" editor. On the other side there's the problem that XSL doesn't have any editors, yet, that get near the functionality of that one from Crystal Reports. WYSIWYG and all. Good luck with the decision. On 16.01.2003 00:43:07 Dianliang Zhu wrote: > I'm currently facing a difficult decision whether to keep developing > reports using FOP or changing over to the Crystal Reports. Having been using > FOP for more than 2 years, I have gained lots of experiences in it. So I > would prefer FOP rather than any other reporting tools. But my work mates > want to use Crystal Reports. They claim that the Crystal Report is better > than FOP in terms of speed, functionality, usability and etc. > I don't know too much about the Crystal Report, so I would really > appreciate if someone can compare different aspects of FOP and Crystal > Report. I need it to justify the development in FOP! Thank you! Jeremias Maerki --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
