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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. Oracle Reports Services provides an unbounded, easy-to-use, scalable, and manageable solution for high-quality database publishing and reporting.

Oracle Reports Services is a powerful enterprise reporting tool used by information system (IS) developers to create sophisticated dynamic reports for the Web and across the enterprise.

The Oracle Reports Services server-based architecture means report consumers require only a Web browser to view reports in industry standard formats. Oracle Reports Services supports on-demand delivery of high-quality reports over the Web through native generation of HTML with Cascading Style Sheets and the Adobe 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 Oracle Internet Application Server Overview

The Oracle Internet Application Server is a scalable, secure, middle-tier application server. Using it you can deliver Web content, host Web applications, connect to back-office applications, and make those services accessible to any client browser. Your users can access information, perform business analysis, and run business applications on the Internet, or on internal and external corporate intranets.

To deliver this wide range of content and services, you can use the Oracle Internet Application Server for:

• Publishing content

• Transaction processing

For additional information about the Oracle Internet Application Server, refer to Oracle Internet Application Server 8i Overview Guide.

1.2 Oracle Reports Services

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

When used in conjunction with the Reports Web CGI or Reports Servlet, Oracle Reports Services also enables you to run reports from a Web browser using standard URL syntax. Oracle Reports Services 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.

Oracle Reports Services 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 through the API. The Reports Queue Manager might reside on the same machine as Oracle Reports Services or on a client machine. On UNIX, you can use the Reports Queue Viewer (RWRQV60) to view the Oracle Reports Services queue.

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

In addition to the Oracle Reports Services, the Oracle Reports Services 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 an Oracle Reports Services report.

Oracle Internet Application Server is an application server that is optimized to deploy Oracle Reports Services 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 Internet Application Server manual for more information.