BIRT-ing Out Loud

Come see us at Eclipse Summit Europe next week (November 19th-20th) to learn more about BIRT and open source product strategies. 

On Wednesday, Paul Clenahan will be presenting a session titled Open Source As Part of a Successful Product Strategy exploring differenct approaches to using open source with your product strategy.

And on Thursday, Jason Weathersby will be presenting Whats New With BIRT 2.3 explaining the BIRT project with a focus on the latest features.

If you’re going to be near Ludwigsburg, Germany next week, then there is still time to sign up.

I was approved to talk at the WJAX developer conference in Munich Germany this week.  For those of you attending this conference, I’ll be teaching the session titled Advanced BIRT Report Customization on Wednesday, November 6th, at 830am.  This session will focus on BIRT report scripting, report reuse with libraries and templates, and internationalization of report content.  For those of you not attending the conference I’ll post the slides and examples on BIRT Exchange as soon as the conference is over.

If you are going to be in the Washington, D.C. area between October 28th and 30th, then stop by and see us at the EclipseWorld 2008 Developer Conference. In the Exhibit Hall, We will be demonstrating the BIRT product line from Actuate showing how to get security, scheduling, and enhanced end-user interactivity for your existing BIRT reports.

Register for an Exhibit Hall pass by this Friday, October 17th, and the pass is FREE!

For those of you attending the conference, on Tuesday I will be assisting Wayne Beaton with the BIRT portion of his tutorial titled Java Development With Ganymede… and on Wednesday, Jason Weathersby will be presenting a session titled Business Intelligence Meets Java which is an Introduction to BIRT 2.3 reporting.

When I’m not presenting a session, I will be spending my time at the BIRT Exchange booth and look forward to hearing about what you’ve done with BIRT.

Register for EclipseWorld and get more information at http://www.eclipseworld.net/.

There are lots of improvements coming with BIRT 2.3 like the new Javascript debugger, many crosstab improvements, the SQL Query Builder prototype, bi-directional support for right-to-left languages, a new horizontal page break property, and much more.

To see BIRT 2.3 in action, plan to attend one of the following BIRT 2.3 events taking place this week:

• On Tuesday, June 24th at 9am PDT, Jason Weathersby will be presenting an hour long webinar hosted by live.eclipse.org on the BIRT 2.3 new features. More information and sign up here.
• On Friday, June 27th at 9am PDT, I will be presenting a 30 minute webinar showing the BIRT 2.3 New Features to the members of BIRT Exchange. More information and sign up here.

We’re headed to Orlando for another IBM Rational Software Developer Conference.  There are several chances to see BIRT in action for those of you attending the show.  On Tuesday, Jason Weathersby from Actuate will be presenting an Introduction to BIRT.  Also on Tuesday, Michael Hanner and Linda Damus from IBM will show you how to write custom BIRT reports for EMF and UML models.  On Wednesday, I’ll present a session on advanced BIRT customization features… and on Thursday, Sean Wilbur from IBM will present a class on effective reporting with IBM Rational ClearQuest using BIRT.  More inforation on these BIRT sessions and the conference can be found here.

Day 3 at EclipseCon has come and gone. I spent the morning preparing for my session on deploying BIRT reports and totally missed the keynote from Sam Ramji from Microsoft… but this blogger can catch you up.

The afternoon sessions on BIRT were very well attended and I really liked how these sessions were arranged. There were (5) 10-minute sessions in the same room all related to BIRT so anyone interested in BIRT reporting could just sit in the same room and the speakers rotated through. I spoke about using the BIRT Web Service Data Source and used an Amazon web service for this example. Pierre Tessier from Actuate showed his BIRT/Google Map mashup example which was very slick. Housing data pulled from a database was plotted on a Google map and conditional formatting on the BIRT report colored the flags on the map. John Ward from Innovent showed an example using the BIRT engine with the Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Philippe Coucaud from NXP showed how to integrate the BIRT chart engine into the Eclipse IDE. One of his examples provided real-time charts of the heap space usage from the IDE. The chart updated itself every second or so and was presented in a View within the Eclipse IDE. The final session was given by Santosh Kumar from IBM who showed his prototype BIRT emitter that produces an Open Document Format (ODF) spreadsheet.

The final BIRT session of the day was from IBM and was divided into two parts. The first half of the session was given by Neil Wang and showed the use of the Open Data Access (ODA) extension within BIRT. This allows a developer to extend the list of available data sources for BIRT reports by adding their own custom data source. This example showed an ODA for connecting to an EMF model. The second half of this session was given by Santosh Kumar and showed a BIRT Composite application for Lotus Notes.

At the end of the day, Jason Weathersby showed some of the cool features coming in BIRT 2.3 later this year. There was lots of chart changes and I was really excited about the script debugger.

Today was the start of the regular sessions at EclipseCon and the day was kicked off with Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs.  Dan is quite entertaining and gave us a bit of insight into how his blog got started and the story behind how he was finally discovered to be the true author of the blog.  Another EclipseCon attendee summed up a few of the humorous bits of the keynote on his blog.

Paul Clenahan from Actuate (and part of the Eclipse BIRT PMC) gave an introductory presentation on the BIRT project and the room was filled to capacity.  There wasn’t even standing room left and some people were turned away at the door.  This talk really needed a larger room.

I also attended the talk by Justin Miranda who is doing some very honorable work with the Partners in Health.  Justin explained the work they are doing on the OpenMRS (open source medical record system) project to provide health care and medication for the poor and the role that BIRT plays in their online solution.

Today was also the opening of the exhibit hall where some of us had way too much fun playing with the BIRT Rocks Equalizer T-shirts.

The weather is incredible in Santa Clara. It’s amazing the difference that 10 degrees makes comparing high 50s in Kansas City to the high 60s here in California. Today was tutorial day at EclipseCon and there were lots of 2 hour sessions to choose from. I spent my day in the BIRT sessions and tried to poke my head outside a few times here and there.

I started my morning with John Ward’s “Basic BIRT Report Development” class. This was a great introductory class and it was nice to see so many interested faces in the room and I learned a few things as well. Jason Weathersby and I taught the “Advanced BIRT Report Customization” class which focused on report and chart scripting… and Scott Rosenbaum taught the “Integrating Reporting into your Application” class which was a very deep dive into the BIRT APIs. Since these three 2-hour tutorials were back-to-back in the same room, I somewhat expected the same people to be there all day. I was a little surprised that the room emptied and filled with a new set of people for each class with very little overlap. It makes sense as I think about it now. The “Basic” tutorial was filled with those new to BIRT or just researching BIRT, the “Advanced” class was filled with folks already using BIRT looking to broaden their knowledge, and the “Integration” class was filled with developers integrating BIRT into an application… and these were clearly 3 different sets of people.

I’m looking forward to tomorrows BIRT talks.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, Talking BIRT-y at EclipseCon in March, I will be presenting 2 sessions on BIRT and will now be presenting on deploying BIRT reports with the iServer Express as well.  In addition to my own sessions, there are lots of other EclipseCon sessions related to BIRT.  In fact, there are 13 different sessions.  The complete list of reporting sessions is available here.  There are 3 BIRT tutorials providing 6 hours of solid learning on Monday, 3 long talks on BIRT on Tuesday, and 2 long talks and 5 short talks on BIRT on Wednesday.  These short talks are very interesting.  There are (5) 10-minute sessions in the same room showing example BIRT reports and charts, application built around BIRT, and extensions to BIRT in a very fast-paced environment.

EclipseCon is less than a week away so there’s still time to register.  Be sure to stop by and see us at the Exhibit hall.

Two of my BIRT sessions were accepted for EclipseCon 2008 so I’ll see you all in Santa Clara in March.

One session is called “Advanced BIRT Report Customization” and deals quite a bit with scripting in BIRT.  I’ll be co-presenting with Jason Weathersby.  Detailed information is available at http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/index.php?page=sub/&id=207.  (P.S.  There is still time to shape this session so if you want to see something specific around BIRT scripting included, email me soon)

The other session is called ”Amazon Web Service Report” and is a fast-paced 10 minute look at using the BIRT Designer to create a report from a Web Service.  Detailed info is available at http://www.eclipsecon.org/2008/index.php?page=sub/&id=209

If you haven’t already done so, you can register for EclipseCon by clicking on the image below.