Application downtimes have significant negative impact on businesses. For a snappy and smooth user experience, a software application should be able to respond to user requests without perceptible delays.
A financial application used by one of our clients had frequent downtimes as it required a new release and deployment every time a custom report was generated. We were tasked to build a generic reporting engine that could support development and deployment of custom reports without system downtimes.We achieved this by developing an engine that used the Open Source Apache POI libraries. This provided an off-the-shelf support for a wide variety of output formats. The engine used XML specification for the reports and it was capable of executing even large reports online or in batch mode.
This engine was further enhanced using the BIRT reporting framework after a decade of successful usage. This enhancement resulted in better design capabilities and more output formats.
