Tuesday, October 12, 2010

No Commercial Version of RAVE for Delphi XE

Where I work our product is very tied to Nevrona's Rave Reports.    We are based around the NDR file format and concept.    Since the release of XE our emails to Nevrona and being ignored we still don't have an XE version of RAVE Reports.

XE is a compelling upgrade for us and as such we have decided to try to upgrade RAVE  to XE.      We do have the commercial 8.0 release.

I don't know about Embarcadero's agreement is with Nevrona but I don't think it's in the best interest of either party to keep bundling RAVE to with Embarcadero.    From Embarcadero's point of view they are shipping a product that points to a company that all but appears dead.     From Nevrona's Point of view they may be able make revenue on a product from those that need to upgrade Delphi versions.   Maybe returning a revenue stream that they have lost because most users just use the free version. I know they can't be making much money now.  

I actually would like to see RAVE become open source.   I know my team would be at the very least committing changes to keep it updated to the latest compilers.

As for our long term roadmap, I don't have a clue.... Research begins now... Looking for Reporting solution that can temporary file that can then be printed, exported to Excel, specified pages of the report can be converted to an image.   (We use TIFF but I can convert from about any format)