See below for article updates
In the year 2001, Delphi 6 was released. In the Delphi 6 Professional box was Rave Reporter "Delphi edition", a no-source edition of Rave Report.
Nevrona Designs Rave Reporter was selected to replace the ill-fated QuickReport in Delphi 1, almost rewritten QuickReport in Delphi 2, ReportSmith (licensed from Crystal Reports) and Object Windows Library Print Preview feature.
VCL as successor to OWL
For those oldies, to print a report in Turbo Pascal for Windows, you had to do direct output to LPT1, LPT2 and learn the Epson printer command language, or HP laser jet ESC-> language. With Windows, you print using Windows GDI commands and they would be translated to the relevant printer-command language (PCL).
To replace Borland ReportSmith
Those of you who used ReportSmith, it required 8 diskettes run-time (exclusive of 5 more diskettes for BDE and around 3 more diskettes for your application). So you shipped your application with around 20 diskettes... or had to buy a CD writer for your application. In those days, CD writers costs US$1000 or more. Not all PCs had CD-ROMs until much later when CD-ROM drives became ubiquitous. It was really pain to use ReportSmith. From Windows 3.1 (or Windows 3.11 with Win32-subset) or Windows 95, you had your application running, BDE running, probably Microsoft Word 7 or Word 95 and with Borland ReportSmith running, it would suck-up all the GDI, USER resources. In order to buy "full-featured" version of ReportSmith after Delphi 5, you had to buy full version Crystal Reports and use that instead. Go figure.
To replace QuickReports 1.0, 2.0
The people who designed QuickReport charged end-users US$499 (they did reduced it to US$399 then US$299) but did not make updates. Thus, Delphi 3, Delphi 4, Delphi 5 had buggy versions of QuickReports and require "extortion" payment and updating code yourself. Since QuickReport did not have a designer (note: there used to be QR Artist, QR Designer add-ons before QBSoft brought them over) The "only" solution was to buy a 3rd-party Report Writer, such as Pirparti Pro, now called Report Builder, SCT-Associates ACE Reporter, FastReports and Nevrona Report Writer. Thus, in order to "use" QuickReport, you had to upgrade almost every year (US$99 per Delphi upgrade), buy PDF add-ons (from either Gnostice/RareFind) (US$99, US$249 with sources), buy a designer (QR Designer or QR Artist) (US$99, US$149-US$299 with sources), buy bar-code addons from TurboPower or some other vendors (US$149 or more) and it becomes a costly affair just to print something out. There were reports and posts from the newsgroups that QuickReports was actually one person vendor.
While Mr. Chad Hower (Kadzu) was working at Nevrona Designs, he managed to convince the Borland folks to license their WinShoes - now called Indy, Delphi for Internet - now called IntraWeb, and Nevrona Design's Report Writer. That must have been an achievement for Mr. Chad Hower and Mr. Jim Gunkel.
The facts don't report the truth
The key fact with Nevrona Design's Rave Report is it is distributed with every copy of Delphi. That must have been quite an achievement. If every Tom, Dick and Harry Delphi developer brought
Nevrona Design's Rave Reporter full-edition instead of the Delphi edition, Mr. Jim Gunkel would have been very rich. There would be thousands of posts on Nevrona Design's newsgroups, plenty of
paid technical support instead thousands of unanswered posts, and the current
unpaid Team Nevrona. It got so bad that
Mr. Thomas Pfister said it was time to say "Goodbye" in his blog posting. I'm sure that Mr. Thomas Pfister felt his time was worth more than that lonely feeling on Nevrona Design's newsgroups.
Reporting late, later and later...
The issues started happening five years back, around Delphi 2006, Delphi 2007 time. There were promises of bug-fixes, promises of new features. The first nail in the coffin was this DEP (Data Execution Prevention) issue that came and went. Although it was never fully fixed, people who deployed the newer Report Printer Pro had this issue.
There was also this nagging issue about WYSIWYG report writer designer that others (Ace Reporter, Duck Report, Pirapati Pro, Fast Report) had. With the new version of Rave Reports, it was delivered - at great cost. It worked almost - The Data pipelines from Delphi to Rave Reports would get "lost" at times, causing much frustration. The RTF export would sometimes be hideous, truncated or unusable, The PDF would give crazy formatting, be un-openable or corrupted, HTML templates comes with really scant documentation and no help on the Nevrona Newsgroups. One wonders why Nevrona Reports was selected to replace QuickReports.
At least - the people at QBSoft care about QuickReports and often reply to questions on the Embarcadero newsgroups asking them to use the latest Embarcadero version of their product. Ditto for the Fast Report people
Rave Unicode
The issue with Delphi, Unicode and Nevrona Designs is the RPT file format that Nevrona uses. They should have gone XML or created a new file format instead of reuse. The trouble with printing, is it takes 1 byte as 1 character and Delphi uses 2 bytes for 1 character. If you do not check your memory allocations, you would have serious buffer overflows or underflows. With everything in Unicode - where PAnsiChar, PChar is different, the trouble started from the day Delphi 2009 was released - an almost unusable Rave Reports was shipped. There were promises, promises to get it fixed but no results (as of writing this article). In the mean time, people got really angry with Rave Reports...
Rave Payments
There was always this "payment issue" and upgrades. In order to get the latest fixes, you had to buy full version of Rave Reports. It was this "Take it or leave it" mentality that killed Borland/CodeGear that persisted into Nevrona Designs. So long as there were thousands of copies of Delphi sold, there would always be this sucker who would buy one or two copies of Rave Reports out of desperation. The difference is, you cannot easily duplicate Delphi, but there are 3 or 4
other report writer solution in the market. You could get FastReport, ReportBuilder, AceReport, Crystal (if you're doing SAP)
Your reviewer will take look at other Report Writers out there and look at one worthy to replace Nevrona Design's Rave.
Business Object's Crystal Reports.The difference between Rave and Crystal Reports is the pointy-hair boss needing a report badly and fast solution to get it. With Rave Reports, you had to buy Delphi, buy some third-party database access solution and then spend more time making reports. With Crystal Reports, you could design almost all of reports and then make minor environment changes (e.g., database server name, database, passing variables, etc.) and your report would
still work. End users loved it because they could write SQL statements and get their data formatted the way they wanted without too much fuss. Since it did not need Delphi, it saved on an unnecessary cost.
Pros: CrystalReports can access SAP information
Cons: Disliked by Delphi developers. Has this huge run-time issue (not really an issue IMHO), poor Delphi integration, uses Basic-like syntax, screens that feel "very basic".
That depends on whether Embarcadero wishes to license Crystal Reports. Remembering the past, ReportSmith wasn't a good idea. It would be better if Embacardero offered some help on Crystal Report's Delphi integration (make it better, more documentation) than hapless Delphi developers asking questions without any answers on Embarcadero's newsgroups.
Combit's List & Label This would be serious contender to replace Nevrona Rave Reports. At the very least, it would solve some pressing problems - like having a working, usable end-user report designer, decent PDF exports and with German language support (for those German people who hate English and must use German) and some understanding that Reporting is serious business.
R&R Reporter
I've included R&R Report writer here because some Delphi developers are great Clipper and Btrieve fans. Some of you might remember the R&R advertisement on Delphi informant, The Delphi Magazine and those special offers on the Delphi Informant many years ago.
Their business practice went in this manner:
1) Liveware would place an advertisement or sent those advertisement letters to you/ or to your business.
3) You would order their starter kit (and still is today - having no free downloads?) and first order.
4) You would probably get
sued or your name smeared for illegal run-time distribution. (??)
5) You find out about other report writers in the market.
Ace Reporter.
Not serious contender, but some people use it. AdaptAccounts uses AceReporter for their older Paradox versions. (They now use ReportBuilder). It has an excellent Report Designer but no run-time editor (they have a run-time viewer to view those Ace Report files). Almost 5 years have passed since 2005 and SCT Associates releases just upgrades for newer compilers.
QuickReport as alternative to Nevrona Design's Rave Reporter.
The newer offering from QBSoft seems to be good enough. QBSoft brought over Timo Hartmaan's QR Designer, QR utilities, and bundled it with Gnostice's PDF export.
One certain vendor - BS/1 software uses QuickReports (and DBISAM) and you would see people begging around for QuickReports full version (and DBISAM) just to compile BS/1 software.
Just for your info - Timothy Young and Samatha Young from ElevateSoft verifies each DBISAM or ElevateDB order. One thing for sure is that nobody leaked DBISAM after that "leak" was identified and shut down. People are always begging for DBISAM or ElevateDB.
QuickReport as replacement, if done right, would be an excellent choice.
Team Spirit Nevrona
The irony of Nevrona Design's closed-source Rave Reports against Indy's almost open-source model of distribution. It was many years ago that Mr. Chad Hower (at Nevrona Designs), open-sourced Indy and parts of (older) Delphi for Internet (now called IntraWeb). Why not open-source Rave Reports? that would enable other people (if given the time and money) to fix it and stop this mess.
Open-source would be an excellent idea. Instead of your reviewer paying for the cost of the product, your reviewer would instead pay for reports to be made (higher-value), add-ons (more higher value) and better works. Strangely, I would pay US$5,000 for a set of reports to be made than pay for the cost for Rave Reports. Mr. Jim Gunkel would be an open-source hero overnight.
Fast Report & Report Builder
Your reviewer looks at the animosity between Mr. Nard Mosely (Digital Metaphors/Report Builder) "DM" and the Fast Report vendor. DM claims that Fast Reports copied most of their code and rewrote it. But if you look deep inside - some parts of FastReports was made into FreeReports on the vendor's site. A detailed analysis revealed similar ideas but different models of implementation.
- The first vendor who had Data Pipelines or DataSet/DataSource components between the database and report writer was Crystal Reports, then AceReport, then picked-up by Pirapati Pro (the "Tpp" prefix in the Report Builder) and FastReports. Ditto for Toolbars. Toolbars are so common, you could throw a rock and it would hit 10 or 20 vendors who made Toolbars before Jordan Russell's Toolbar97/ Toolbar 2000 drove them out of business.
- FastReport has it's own Scripting (called FastScripts) and Decision Cube (FastCube) and the enterprise version comes with full sources.
- Formerly, you had to buy Jame Waler's TExportDevices for ReportBuilder, but with FastReport, you could get somewhat decent PDF export.
Your reviewer used QR, QR Designer, Ace Report, Report Builder, FastReport, and rolled his own reports during those DOS days, wrote Windows 3.1 report writer mini-library and could say:
- Fast-Reports has issues with support because there are many unanswered posts on their newsgroups and forums. Registered customers are asked to go to their official support channels (email, their web-based helpdesk) instead. For Digital Metaphors, you have support, inclusive of Psychic hotline service. Support is mixed. With FastReport, you can recompile full-sources so it means you can fix problems yourself. With ReportBuilder, you need support because you cannot recompile the sources; that leads to DCU mismatch error.
- FastReport is easier to use and has lower-costs, much lower than Rave or ReportBuilder.
- FastReport has a cousin called FreeReports if you do not have so much money and need free solution.
- FastReport can do dot-matrix and margins almost correct with no crazy printer problems. ReportBuilder does it too, but the hard-wiring of margins is concern. For example - how do you know if the person having an Inkjet or Laser printer can print the report correctly if the printer feed margins differ with each printer?
- ReportBuilder has better support and better implementations.
DevExpress VCL ReporterYour reviewer would really prefer DevExpress VCL Report writer solution rather than buy something else, but sadly, this never materialized.
Report Nirvana?
Whatever Embarcadero chooses, it should choose wisely. There's only one chance to get a good report writer for Delphi and not blow-it-up like the past - Report Smith, QuickReports 1, 2 and Nerona Design's Rave. If Embarcadero brought Nevrona Designs, it would probably be ill-fated like Delphi for Bold or that TogetherSoft purchase.
Preparing for Linux, OSX and 64-bit Report Writer solution?
Given there is so much at stake - with the demise of Nevrona Reports, it would throw a spanner on Embacardero's 64-bit compiler and 32-bit IDE. Interesting question would be -- how would you deploy a 64-bit report writer if the IDE is only 32-bits? That would mean Nevrona would have to design their product 5 or 6 times - one for Delphi 32-bit IDE and 64-bit Run-time solution, one for Linux, one for OSX...
Let's not talk about having a nice grid solution for Delphi...
:)
Updated article - Smells like team spirit, two years later
http://delphihaters.blogspot.com/2012/09/smells-like-team-spirit-nevrona-two.html
