January 6 Meeting: Meet Birt

You're cordially invited to our next Gateway JUG meeting, Tuesday January 6, 2008 at 6pm.

Jack Frosch, long absent while doing a stint at a local community college, will be talking about BIRT. BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) are some very interesting tools that have emerged out of Eclipse.org.

During a team meeting at MIT, a colleague asked in a sidebar for suggestions on reporting tools. Like many of you, I've had occasion to use JasperReports along with its iReport visual designer, so I naturally suggested JasperReports. It's a mature technology and well regarded by the developer community. However, another colleague suggested BIRT, a reporting tool from Eclipse.org based on Eclipse. His recommendation was pretty glowing, so my curiosity was piqued.

As the meeting continued, I downloaded a new Eclipse distribution that included BIRT. (Okay, I admit it; I hate meetings!) Without resorting to any documentation, I was able to navigate around the tool to set up a live datasource, design a simple tabular report, and execute the report in a HTML preview mode - all in about 15 minutes after the install!

After that brief experience, I investigated it a bit more and concluded BIRT was a compelling enough story to be shared with the Gateway JUG.

At our January 6th meeting, I will explore and demonstrate highlights about the following BIRT topics:

• Easy Installation of BIRT
• Creating Your First BIRT Project
• Setting Up and Using A Datasource To Bind Data
• Designing a Report Using Text, Graphics, Charts, and Links
• Sorting, Grouping, Filtering, and Aggregating Report Data
• Writing Custom Expressions For A Report
• Creating a Crosstab Report
• Deploying A Report

So come on out for our first meeting of 2009! As always, please RSVP so we can plan for the meeting. (See RSVP instructions in the sidebar menu.)

As a bonus, we'll be giving away one copy of BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting (2nd Edition) (Eclipse Series) as a door prize.

Presented By: Jack Frosch
Sponsored By: Objistics
Meeting Notes: Download MeetBirt.pdf.zip (28336.0K)