Re: Native sFTP?

From: Richard Schoen
Why would you simply drop Jasper Reports ? It's a great reporting
engine.

There is one thing that really impresses me about Jasper Reports, which is the number of output format options available (such as PDF).

It seems rather odd that a report engine would use AWT, but if that's the case, I can see why it wouldn't run well under IBM i - the WT in AWT stands for Windowing Toolkit, after all.

Some of my colleagues instantiated the report engine from a Servlet, to keep it active, rather than instantiating a new JVM instance for each report. That improved performance a lot.

But I dropped Jasper Reports in favor of generating HTML stream files from RPG programs, and using .CSS for GUI formatting and page ejects. I'm using a service program API to simultaneously generate stream files and add references to an interactive report catalog.

HTML works very well for formatted output in most cases. Layout a report template, using Dreamweaver. Generate reports with RPG. But one drawback is the occasional need for PDF output. So far, I've been using the browser print option to stream reports to a PDF writer when needed. But I don't like the manual intervention. That needs to be automated, in some cases.

Which kind of brings us back to the topic on hand - I've been looking into an HTML to PDF conversion utility - but it runs under PASE - it's not native.

Nathan.