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Introduction

In today's fast-moving, competitive business world, clear and up-to-date information is needed for the accurate, expedient decision making requirements of an often geographically distributed workforce. The timely distribution of that information must be reliable, cost effective, and accessible to everyone who requires it. Reports Developer provides an unbounded, easy-to-use, scalable, and manageable solution for high-quality database publishing and reporting.

Reports Developer is a powerful enterprise reporting tool used by IS developers to create sophisticated dynamic reports for the Web and across the enterprise.

Reports Developer's server-based architecture means report consumers require only a Web browser to view reports in industry standard formats. The Oracle Reports Server supports on-demand delivery of high-quality reports over the Web through native generation of HTML with Cascading Style Sheets and Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Maintenance overhead costs are cut as reports are administered and maintained centrally and there is no requirement to install complex software on every user's PC.

1.1 The Oracle Reports Server

The Reports Server enables you to implement a multi-tiered architecture for running your reports. With the Reports Server, you can run reports on a remote application server.

When used in conjunction with the Reports Web CGI or Reports Servlet, the Reports Server also enables you to run reports from a Web browser using standard URL syntax. The Reports Server can be installed on Windows NT, Windows 95, or UNIX. It handles client requests to run reports by entering all requests into a job queue. When one of the server's runtime engines becomes available, the next job in the queue is dispatched to run. As the number of jobs in the queue increases, the server can start more runtime engines until it reaches the maximum limit specified when the server process was started. Similarly, idle engines are shut down after having been idle for longer than a specified period of time.

The Reports Server keeps track of a predefined maximum number of past jobs. Information on when the jobs are queued, started, and finished is kept, as well as the final status of the report. This information can be retrieved and reviewed on Windows from the Reports Queue Manager (RWRQM60) or via the API. The Reports Queue Manager may reside on the same machine as the Reports Server or on a client machine. On UNIX, you can use the Reports Queue Viewer (RWRQV60) to view the Reports Server's queue.

1.1.1 Oracle Reports Server

The Reports Server is one of the components of Oracle Reports Server, a new generation of development tools that enable you to deploy new and existing Oracle Reports Developer reports on an internal company intranet, external company extranet, or on the Internet.

In addition to the Reports Server, the Oracle Reports Server includes the Graphics Server. The Graphics Server assists with the deployment of Oracle Graphics. Graphics are deployed as Graphic Interchange Format (.GIF) files, which can be embedded in HTML or incorporated into a Reports Developer report.

Oracle Reports Server is an application server that is optimized to deploy Oracle Reports Developer applications (Reports and Graphics) in a multi-tiered environment. It takes advantage of the ease and accessibility of the Web, elevating it from a static information-publishing mechanism to an environment capable of supporting complex applications.

For more information about the Forms Server and Graphics Server, refer to the Oracle Forms Developer: Deploying Forms Applications to the Web with Oracle Forms Server manual for more information.