Special Edition Using® Crystal Reports® 10

Crystal Enterprise Architecture Overview

At the highest level, Crystal Enterprise has four main tiers: the client tier, application tier, Crystal Enterprise Server tier, and database tier (see Figure 24.1):

• The client tier consists of Web-based and installed applications. You can alternatively categorize these applications into end-user applications such as the Web-based Web Desktop, which enables end users to access data, management applications such as the Web-based Crystal Management Console, and content creation applications such as Crystal Reports or Crystal Analysis. In the majority of cases, the client tier for a Crystal Enterprise user is his Web browser.

• The application tier consists of application processing—typically on an application ...