BIRT-ing Out Loud

It’s hard to believe the BIRT Exchange community site is already one year old.  Instead of getting presents for it’s first birthday, the folks behind BIRT Exchange were busy giving presents away.  The most active BIRT Exchange users over the past year were contacted recently and asked to choose a gift. 

There were many active users on BIRT Exchange who helped make this site a success so it was difficult to decide who should get gifts.  For this task, we took into consideration the number of forum posts, examples submitted to DevShare, plus comments made and ratings applied to other submissions.  These active members were asked to choose between an Official BIRT Rocks! T-Qualizer shirt and a set of BIRT Books (BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT)

Some people have not yet chosen their gift, however it is clear that the majority of these members emailed have chosen the BIRT Rocks shirt.

Thanks to everyone who helped make the first year of BIRT Exchange a success.

We’ve just launched a new RSS feed on BIRT Exchange that will notify you when new examples are submitted to the DevShare.  For those that don’t know, DevShare is an area on BIRT Exchange where anyone can post examples they found helpfull in their report development.  You can post example BIRT and e.Spreadsheet report designs, code samples, helpful tips and tricks, tutorials, and links to external resources like technical articles and blog posts.  By subscribing to this RSS feed, you will be notified as soon as new items are submitted.

You can find the orange RSS feed icon on the DevShare page or a direct link is below:

BIRT Exchange DevShare RSS Feed

BIRT Exchange Blog RSS Feed

We’ve added a new live report environment to BIRT Exchange so you can play around with a number of products that make BIRT reports more interactive.

You can try out the BIRT Designer for End Users, that allows you to create BIRT reports over the web, or the Interactive Viewer that allows you to change the formatting of a BIRT report as you view it.

We’ll also be using this environment to host reports that illustrate design concepts that we refer to in DevShare entries or Forum posts.

Check it out here.

Two popular books, BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting and Integrating and Extending BIRT, have been updated.  These books are now on their second edition and each include many more pages and examples.

The first book, BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting, includes 109 more pages than the previous edition and covers several of the latest product features, including cross tabs and OLAP cubes, new chart types, web services as a data source, new report output formats, using CSS files, and localization of reports.  We found the second edition of this book at Amazon and informIT.

The second book, Integrating and Extending BIRT, includes 136 more pages and includes several new architectural diagrams and covers report and chart scripting, BIRT tag libraries, using the BIRT Web Viewer, JNDI support, an ODA plugin example, and lots more.  We also found the second edition of this book at Amazon and informIT.

Welcome. Today is the official launch of BIRT Exchange. There are many people at Actuate that have put an enormous amount of time and effort into building a high quality and useful site dedicated to developers using Eclipse BIRT or the Actuate BIRT product line. We believe there is pent up demand for a place where developers can easily share code and knowledge with peers, find solutions to their deployment challenges, and learn about Actuate’s product, support and service offerings for Eclipse BIRT. BIRT Exchange aims to be that place.

So what will you find here… Most importantly, you’ll find a community of like minded individuals to share your report development experiences, plus a set of forums organized around solutions so that questions in each forum are from people in similar stages of their reporting projects. You’ll also find a searchable mirror of the Eclipse BIRT newsgroups - there’s lots of valuable information flowing through that channel and you’ll have access to that in the forum search.

You’ll also find an area called the DevShare, which is a place where report developers can share code, report designs, tips, as well as links to valuable BIRT resources on the web. Basically, anything you have found useful during your BIRT development cycle can be shared here. There is also a Wiki that we are using initially to hold the FAQ questions and Getting Started pages.

For those of you ready to take your BIRT project to the next level, you can learn about the Actuate BIRT product line and support. You also have access to recorded demos, documentation, downloads and evaluations of Actuate products or can sign up for a BIRT training class.

There are some things that you will not find here. You will not find the tools and resources that are associated with the development of BIRT or things associated with the Eclipse BIRT project planning. These resources, like the Project Charter, the Project Development Plans, as well as the BIRT committer resources and bug submission pages are still on the Eclipse BIRT Project pages at Eclipse.org.

We hope you find this site useful and encourage you to give us your feedback as a comment to this blog post… or within the Announcements and Feedback forum. Tell us what you like, don’t like, what’s not working and suggestions for other things you’d like to see on BIRT Exchange.

If you’re reading this post prior to our official launch, then you’ve done your homework to find this URL. We’re biting our tongues to keep the URL a secret until the site is ready but we know most users of BIRT are savvy enough to find what they are looking for.

If this is your first time passing through the site, take a look at the Welcome Post. The “Register” link is active, however, email confirmations will not be going out until the site is ready (likely in the next few weeks). I wish I could tell you to leave a comment that you were here, however, that requires registration… so, the view count (above near the title) is your only indication of how many other people like yourself have found their way in.

In the meantime, have a look around and enjoy.

Virgil

Hello and welcome to BirtExchange.com. This new site sprung up with an idea of providing a space for all things related to BIRT available all in one place. As the name of the site implies, this is a place where people with a similar interest (BIRT ) can exchange report designs, templates, example code, plug-ins, or even ideas, frustrations, and resolutions.

Many of you have become BIRT experts and have shared your ideas on the web… so there’s lots of good BIRT content out there and this site will allow you to see all of that content together. If you’ve created a reporting masterpiece, figured out a workaround to a complex reporting problem, or just run across a helpful article or blog entry related to BIRT, then add it to the site, or let me know and I’ll add it.

As you explore the site, you will find tons of helpful features including forums, downloadable examples, a wiki, online documentation, and demos of various BIRT features and related products.

We hope this site serves your BIRT needs and we welcome your comments. If you find the site useful, don’t forget to share it with your friends.

Virgil Dodson
Java Reporting Evangelist for Actuate Corporation