The new version of Crystal Reports provides Java-based report design and deployment tool that plugs into the open source Eclipse application development framework. It lets developers embed Crystal reports more easily into their Eclipse-developed applications.
A basic version of Crystal Reports for Eclipse, for designing and deploy reports on a single server, can be freely downloaded from the new Diamond website that the company launched to support the launch.
A professional version, designed for multi-server deployments, is priced at $495 per server.
Officials at San Jose, California-based Business Objects point to over 50,000 downloads of Crystal Reports for Eclipse since the beta version became available in January this year – testament to the commercial prowess of the Crystal brand on corporate desktops today.
The Eclipse tie up underscores Business Objects’ leadership in the embedded reporting market, a reputation the company gained through tight integration of Crystal Reports into popular IDE’s like Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, IBM Rational Application Developer, BEA Workshop, and Borland JBuilder.
Business Objects isn’t the only BI vendor looking to reach out to the Eclipse open source development community. Actuate Corp is the prime sponsor of the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) project. The South San Francisco-based BI company also provides commercially backed version of BIRT under the Actuate brand.
The announcement was made at the Linuxworld Expo conference in San Francisco.
