Integrating BIRT into our webapps

Jotuns

Hello,

Let me explain the situation before I start asking questions. Our company makes desktop applications and web applications for several different clients. Most applications are for administrations.

Currently on the desktop applications we use Crystal Reports for generating reports. On the web applications however we don't have anything that seperates back-end from front. When someone wants something a report changed, the software engineers have to edit it in HTML.

What we want is to have something like we got in the desktop applications. A report designer en something to render the reports, so that when something needs changed, the report designer can just change the design.

I've been looking into several reporting systems and I think BIRT suits our needs the best. I've got a few questions about the integration of BIRT into our web applications and the possible best way to implement it.

The first problem is that you'll need the JVM to generate reports. I've been looking and several options of how to implement BIRT, and the BIRT Viewer seems to be the easiest way. The problem is that we don't run the servers that run our web applications and they most likely don't have a tomcat server on that machine. I've been thinking of just buying a dedicated tomcat server who can run the servlet and who can handle our reports.

Also we give users a few options and out of this comes a query who will get data from the database. This data will be transformed to xml to use as a datasource in XML.

Can anybody give me advice if this is a good way to implement BIRT, or that there is a smarter way of going about this problem? or to even go with something like BIRT or maybe go a other way entirely?

Thanks in advance!