Thursday, June 09, 2005
BIRT wow!. Finally, Java reports made easy [Martin Perez's Weblog] Wow. Today I was adventurous, and I said to myself: "Let's try birt, even that there is no much tutorials and samples available - I only found these screencasts, but I haven't seen them yet.
I downloaded all the packages, and first of all tried to launch the demos, but with few results. Well, not at all, the charting demos goes fine. They throw several exceptions, but most of the samples worked. Here are some screenshots (click on them to enlarge!).
Next, I started Eclipse. I switched to Report perspective, and created a new report. That's good, you can visually design your reports. There is a component palette and a properties view to configure your components. So I added a simple text label.
Next, I went to the data menu and configured a JDBC source. That's great. You can browse through your tables, columns, filter the data, create computable columns, use javascript functions. It seems very powerful! I created a database set with a tabla that was in the database sample (embedded derby database). There is a Data Explorer view, that allow you to see those generated datasets.
But now comes the best part. I created a data widget on the report, and then I drag my database and dropped it directly on the widget. And Birt automatically updated the data and created a grid with the database contents!
And to end, I lanuched a preview in PDF, and BIRT automatically opened acrobat. Well, the preview isn't very beautiful, but I didn't care about formatting. It's only a test.
And all these tasks only took about two minutes! Finally, it seems that there is a very productive Open Soruce reporting environment in Java. I don't agree with the BIRT name, because I don't see business intelligence features anyway, but I have to recognize that it seems a powerful and easy engine.
