[wellylug] SugarCRM and JasperReports on Linux

[David Harrison]

On 18/10/2006, at 9:37 PM, William Hamilton wrote:

> David Harrison wrote:
>> On 18/10/2006, at 8:30 PM, William Hamilton wrote:
>>> Hi all.  has anyone installed JasperReports on Linux before?  I  
>>> am looking for a bit of guidance. I am not a Java person and  
>>> documentation I can find does not cover much on the install/  
>>> setup... rather, the design of reports.
>> JasperReports is a reporting library for Java and not really an  
>> 'application' that you install.
>>> Install will be on Debian which has SugarCRM already working etc.

> The situation I have is a client who used SugarCRM on a Windows  
> machine has now migrated to a Linux box (after a bit of a booboo on  
> their part).
>
> I setup multiple Sugar instances for them on for them on teh new  
> box ok but the reports they are used to rely on JasperReports.  I  
> have never played with it before..  and not had much to do with  
> Tomcat either... which I am slowly working through the setup of.

Are they using this? (it would seem appropriate for Sugar):
http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/jasperreports/

As for Java/Tomcat on Linux I'd say go for Tomcat 5.5 and Java 1.5, I  
don't use Debian (mainly Suse) but I am guessing Java's license means  
its not yet a part of the standard system. I used to be a fan of  
IBM's JDK as it is very fast, but with Java 1.5+ Sun has are now  
producing a very solid and fast JVM.

I also manually install Tomcat from the latest download archive as  
often I have found many distributions do tricky little things like  
putting Tomcat config files under /etc, logs under /var/log and data  
files somewhere else. This is great from a distribution perspective  
but when it comes to actually getting things working quickly it can  
be a real handicap. Using a concise installation means you can get  
things working on your desktop PC and then do a straight file copy to  
the server and have it work (most of the time).

Often the difficult part about Java web-apps is getting Apache  
talking to Tomcat for load balancing and fail-over. Its not an  
essential step but it does improve performance and is generally used  
in production environments (Apache serves static content and offloads  
Java stuff to Tomcat). This mainly done through mod_jk (although it  
can be achieved via mod_proxy and other methods) and it can be a bit  
of a dark art at times :-)


David