BIRT Reporting - Actuate Tools Reviewed

[pa...@bappoo.com]

A review of the Actuate BIRT reporting tool set with tutorials and
examples from an end users perspective plus comparisons between the
open source Eclipse version and the commercial Actuate version.
After a great start with the free open source Birt reporting tools in
the Eclipse IDE, it was time to download and install the Actuate Birt
Reporting implementation and see what the difference was. I started
out by taking a look at Birt-Exchange.com and found that there were
several download options available so I had to make selections as to
the best package components to download for review. Luckily there are
some good online resources, including feature comparison charts where
you can read up on the details of the different packages and where you
can watch some BIRT videos showing the various elements of
functionality contained in the different downloads.

After looking at the various Birt reporting examples the components I
eventually settled on were:

BIRT Designer Professional
Interactive Report Viewer
iServerExpress

The downloads were a little hefty and it took an hour or so to get all
the files but after that the installation was straight forward and I
was up and running with the Actuate Birt report designer in no time.
This allowed me plenty of time to look at some of the features,
tutorials and examples of this report designer and compare them to the
open source designer. Essentially they are very similar so if you are
familiar with the BIRT perspective within Eclipse then you will pick
this up very quickly. If you need an introduction to Eclipse then
please see my earlier reports which are available from my web site.
Having downloaded the Birt Reporting Actuate packages I ran through a
few examples following some online Birt reporting tutorials and my
existing experience of the Eclipse open source implementation. On the
way I encountered a few little problems but found that I could figure
out and implement a solution pretty quickly with only limited
reference to the excellent online help being necessary.

Here is a list of the things I attempted:

Creating a project
Creating a report within the project
Creating a joint data source based on two separate data sources
Applying filters to the data source
Adding data to the report
Grouping data
Augmenting an existing data set
Simple report formatting
Computed columns
Flash charts

In conclusion the Actuate Birt report designer is an excellent piece
of software which adds some nice touches to the open source version. I
found myself going back to the pure Eclipse Birt implementation and
feeling a little lost without the extras. Actuate have put a lot of
thought and consideration about the end user experience into this and
it is highly recommended. To access the full version of this report on
PDF with full step by step instructions and screen shots please visit
http://www.BirtReporting.com and signup for your free site membership.
This is a complete guide to getting started with the commercial
implementation of Actuate BIRT featuring detailed usage instructions
for the software features indicated above and draws many comparisons
between the open source version and the commercial version.