Just wanted to weigh in here from a Brainfood perspective. Brainfood is
very interested in using BIRT to solve reporting problems for customers.
I am more interested in BIRT than Jasper Reports for several reasons
including: good Eclipse integration which is good for in-house IT
reporting capabilities in a customer, prefer the CPL over the LGPL,
Google appears to favor BIRT by granting it a higher result count. If I
had another high level contender for reporting it would be generating
OpenOffice documents because of the much better WYSIWYG content layout
tools that OpenOffice provides. The license of OpenOffice is problematic
for OFBiz so BIRT is the better choice for the project. Arguably,
however, one could do some things to generate ODF format documents and
ignore the fact that OpenOffice is the defacto standard for rendering them.
I know some about the BIRT architecture and believe its calculated
report feeds offer the ability to pull data directly from the
EntityEngine. I haven't had time to examine Hans' implementation but I
am very curious about it.
My $0.02
Scott Gray wrote:
I haven't looked at the branch and I know nothing about birt but I do
have some questions:
Other than the branch itself is there any documentation about this
component, how it works and what it acheives?
How does it relate to the existing BI component? Is it going to make
that component redundant?
Has any effort been put into looking at other reporting utilities or
are we just dumping this into the framework because it's (arguably)
ready to go? Does it need to go into the framework or could it work
just as well as a special purpose component which might make for
easier replacement later on? If not, why not?
