Actuate, Pentaho, Others Throw Support Behind Open-Source Report-Builder
January 23, 2006 4:29 PM ET
A set of technology vendors put their hats into the ring for the new Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project version 2.0, an update to the open-source report-building platform for Java developers that premiered last week. <P> BIRT is designed to let Java developers integrate reporting into their own apps and to facilitate the production of third-party commercial software that makes use of open-source reporting. Developers cut the time and effort they spend on hand-coding core functions, especially reporting and analysis. BIRT enables HTML and PDF report-production in a matter of hours. <P> The list of vendors who either announced support this week for BIRT 2.0 or plan to extend their Eclipse-based products with Eclipse BIRT 2.0 include business intelligence software firm Actuate, IBM, open-source BI entrant Pentaho, the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform Project, application performance testing firm Scapa Technologies, and Zend, a maker of products focused on the PHP Web scripting language. <P> New features of BIRT 2.0 include a report component re-use library that lets developers share their work within organizations and the open-source community, and a page-on-demand navigation mechanism that allows the viewing of large report documents over the Internet. Also new are external style sheets that make it easier to establish a common look across reports; a scripting editor; a function that lets report end-users click on a URL to navigate through report pages in any order, and a wizard for building common usage charts. <P> "The ability to add and extend reporting components will allow developers to easily create specialized and reusable components for report builders," said Eclipse Foundation executive director Mike Milinkovich in a prepared statement. "This should accelerate the number of commercial companies building Eclipse-based products, and the number of VARs developing Eclipse-based solutions."
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