5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
- BIRT is an Eclipse project: This made sure that the project is going to be live and evolving (as an open source project) in the times to come and will become more feature rich as the time passes. We were not afraid that someone is going to close the source directly or indirectly (by selling documentation at high prices) by creating a future version that will require commercial support to do anything but trivial.
- BIRT uses standard technologies to the maximum level: It uses HTML for layout related things, JavaScript for scripting and CSS for styling! It naturally means we can leverage the existing knowledge that our developers have in creating the kind of reports our customer want. Faster and at lower costs.
- BIRT offers very good GUI Designer: A graphical designer not just makes your life easier while developing the reports but you can also give it to your customers so that they can also do some small changes that they might need here or there in the report. Most important thing is that BIRT designer is group of plugIns for Eclipse IDE and hence quality of the report designer is excellent.
- BIRT has a very nice Web Viewer: Yes it comes with nice pre-integrated ajax enabled web viewer that your can run from Tomcat (our favourite) or any other Application Server in less than few minutes.
- BIRT has quality documentation, sample database, example reports: All this reduced the learning curve to a very affordable level.
If you are looking for a serious reporting solution (open source), I will recommend that you should consider evaluating BIRT. May be you can find the technology you are looking for.
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
Hi Quadri,
In your previous message you have mentioned that you want to use BIRT report engine into your commercial software. Did you mean you want to add the designer into the product you suppose to deliver to the user? If yes, could you please let me know How can I do that too. Well I also want to integrate the BIRT designer into the executable product so that user can create their own reports while using the software. I am using eclipse rcp framework.
If you please reply soon, would be a great help.( jessorean@yahoo.com )
Thanks in advance
Joha
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
I will update you as we progress towards embedding the designer right inside our application. Since BIRT designer is nothing but bunch of eclipse plug-ins, I am sure it can be integrated into any RCP product with moderate effort.
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
hi, i really belive that BIRT is the BEST poassible thing available for report gen.but what i want to know is how to Execute BIRT reports in tomcat without using web viewer
i m looking for the samr answer for many days but didnt succeded.
so plz reply [catchme33@gmail.com]
thx
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
You can also connect to viewer application using URLConnection and fetch the report. You can now store it to disk or serve it to the users the way you want.
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
You can execute BIRT from your own Java class like this example shows, Execute BIRT Reports from Java Class
or, as mentioned already, it is easier to deploy the viewer and then call one of the servlets to generate the output. A nice viewer reference is available at, BIRT Viewer 2.3 User Reference
Re: 5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport
Hi,
Thankyou for a nice post.I am evaluating BIRT for one of projects.I managed to deploy BIRT Viewer to the server and run the reports.
My questions are
Have you managed to design report parameter pages with birt (in the scenario of using the BIRT Viewer)?