BIRT engine in portlet, avoiding startup

Boden

I've got a portlet that uses BIRT to display a few reports.

When I hard code the database settings into each report, it looks to me like the BIRT engine only loads once for the portlet instance - so I can view multiple reports in my portlet and only the first report comes up a little slow while the engine loads up. Subsequent reports run and display very quickly.

The problem is that I don't want to hard code database settings into each report, but when I use parameters to set things up dynamically, it appears as though the engine completely reloads for each report in the portlet. It is at the very least reloading the database driver each time. Thus there is a multi-second delay every time I view a new report in the portlet which is unacceptable.

I am unable to use JNDI in my deployment environment, but I'm not sure that would help.

How can I dynamically configure my report data sources without this reloading problem?

Or maybe a better question: is there any way to deploy the BIRT engine such that it is always running on the app server, and then use the running instance to render my reports? For security reasons I can't pass parameters via HTTP, I have to configure and render the reports in code.

My app server is Tomcat 5.5. My portlet is running on Liferay 5.1.