Nevrona Rave - 20 years and XE8-version available-

I had a look at my blog last month and realized that it’s been very less activities from myself … But this can kind of be expected. I’ve had a busy few years at work with some major changes, lecturing some courses, at home, pretty much everywhere.
Put this together and my age and my life has been way too full, and I’ve decided to slow down a bit and let everything happen in a more relaxed manner.

But last week I’ve realized that in April 2015 the ReportEngine from Nevrona is 20 years old!

 Started with ReportPrinterPro and extended with RAVE in Version 3.0 and at the moment in version 11.0.10 with XE8-support available. Read the interview with Jim Gunkel in this post!

And: the website from Nevrona is rebuild, finally!

20 years of success for Rave ?! No, not really for all of the 20yrs    :-( 

In the first years Nevrona was on the Delphi Informant Magazin in the  report-engine area the first place. The solution was not only stable, it was really fast and had many possibilities for the requirements of reporting.
With Rave have Nevrona switched from code-based to visual reporting. This change was for me a real nightmare ...
I bought the update of v3 and started RAVE, but it looks like a project without any sense...
After many nights with fighting and searching I found the key of the architecture and it make "klick" for me. On every developer day I recognize more and more the power and the possibilities and love RAVE. A long time ago in the kylix-age Nevrona made a kylix-version of RAVE and this combination works great, like Delphi 7 and Rave. With the step from Delphi into the unicode-world in 2009 the ReportEngine made slow progress and after the crash of the website from nevrona.com many developers think that Nevrona isn’t active anymore.

In many trainings  and presentation in Europe and US I showed the power of Rave and have written uncounted reports in my (C/S-)applications and for many companies around the world. I was active on newsgroups, wrote Rave-articles and so on.
I moved from the developer-part more in the it-management part (CIO right now) and had less time to develop and stay up-to-date. But all of my apps works with Rave on the newest OS-versions and so on without any problems. This year I'll transfer some old, but daily running apps in the world (e.g. > 15.000 users every day), into XE8. The first impression of XE8 is great and with the new Rave 11.0.10 for XE8 and the great FireDAC-components from EMBT it should be done in a few days.


I’ve asked some questions to Jim Gunkel from Nevrona Designs last week.

Hello Jim, you’re the CEO of Nevrona Design, based in Arizona.

How would you describe „20 years of RAVE Reporting“ ?
I started with Turbo Pascal back in 1984 and I still remember using several Turbo Power products back in those early DOS days on many of my programming projects and thinking how cool it would be to create products that was used by other programmers.  When Windows 3 came out and everyone was converting their apps to the new graphical environment I was disappointed I was going to lose my favorite programming language but then there was Delphi to the rescue and all was good!

At the time I just happened to be working on a project that required a very unique reporting challenge (using data from a multi-node tree relationship database) and had written a code based printing library to create the many strangely formatted report designs I had in front of me.

Back then everyone doing Delphi was on CompuServe and there was a nice system in place for shareware authors (SWREG I believe) to purchase software through CompuServe and then the software authors would get paid from them.  ReportPrinter 1.0 was put up for sale for $25 but I didn’t really expect many to be interested in it.  Much to my wife’s and my surprise the orders started to come in along with lots of suggestions for enhancements.  I was hooked right then and there and it was a great outlet for my programming passion.

There’s been a lot of additions to the product line including a name change to ReportPrinter Pro and finally to Rave Reports along the way.  We supported Borland’s ventures into Linux and .NET and included a bundled version with Delphi for quite a few versions.  It’s been an amazing adventure creating code that other software developers use within their applications and getting to know the great members of the Delphi community at the many conferences and user groups that we’ve attended over the years.


In the last 5 years there was a silence part of Rave Reporting. Can you explain why ?
We never gave up on Rave Reports and Nevrona Designs and tried to keep up with things as best we could but had several personal issues that unfortunately caused us to lose focus on communications with our customers.  Caring for and losing several of our parents and also having to deal with a special needs child through some rather violent teen years were the main factors.  Family has always been very important to me and through this time my family needed me.

The good news is that my wife and I have stayed strong throughout and as we have been bouncing back to normal it’s been great to hear from many of our dedicated customers that we’ve know for so long.  We’ve got a redesigned/reorganized website (finally!) and have released several updates to Rave Reports 11 with more on the way.


And with Rave 11 and v12 on the horizont Nevrona Design will go back on the Reporting-area of Delphi. What are your plans and have you a roadmap for Rave ?
We’ve already been working on new features for Rave 12.  We are very interested in the new mobile and non-Windows markets that Embarcadero is targetting.  Other features such as major PDF enhancements and new report viewing systems that aren’t tied to a printed page (or Windows APIs) are also very likely.  As we get closer to a release we’ll communicate a more detailed road map with our customers.


Thank you Jim for your answers to me and all the customers, waiting for a sign of activities from Nevrona Designs.