Actuate BIRT is always based on the latest stable version of
BIRT, with additional service fixes. It is also a standalone RCP product. While the
Eclipse version is integrated into Eclipse and you can actively use other Eclipse
products, the Actuate version is BIRT only.
Why BIRT?
As I mentioned before, there are other open-source reporting platforms out there.
So what makes BIRT stand out over JasperReports or Pentaho? With JasperReports,
in reality, it comes down to tastes. I prefer the "What You See Is What You Get"
(WYSIWYG) designer of BIRT over JasperReports. I also like the fact that it does
not require compiling of reports to run, and that it is an official Eclipse project.
However, that is not to say Jasper is not without strengths of its own. Jasper does do
pixel-perfect rendering of reports, which is something that BIRT does not do. Later
versions of Jasper also support the Hibernate HQL language.
Chapter 1
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When compared to Pentaho, it's an even harder comparison to make. Part
of Pentaho's business intelligence Platform makes use of the BIRT engine,
demonstrating some of the flexibility of the open-source model. Pentaho also
includes a wide range of tools for business intelligence operations as a whole, such
as Pentaho Data Integration Project, formerly known as Kettle??”a tool used for
Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) of data from one source to another.
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