For years you
have leveraged hand-coded and database-driven web pages for your reporting. You
have come to the conclusion that development time takes too long, and decide to
leverage your existing J2EE platform; you decide it is time to change your report
development habits.
After extensive research, you have come up with a list of requirements: Reports must
have the ability to be accessible online, with the ability to export to common desktop
formats, such as Microsoft Office formats and Adobe PDF. You need pagination
and navigation of your reports. You would also like to take the hand-coding of
reports out of the loop, to make them quicker to develop and deploy. As you work
in a development group, you need the ability to share common reporting elements
among your group. You would also like the platform to be flexible and dynamic,
and need charting capabilities. However, you have no budget at this time for an
enterprise reporting platform; so you decide on an open-source platform. After some
research, you come across BIRT, and decide it is the way to go.
What is BIRT
If you are new to BIRT, or unfamiliar with Eclipse, you may be asking, "What exactly
is BIRT?" The first thing that comes to mind is a fuzzy puppet with a unibrow. Well,
this BIRT isn't related, although some may consider it fuzzy and cute.
Pages:
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31