Actuate Launches BIRT Exchange

September 25, 2007; 04:36 AM

San Mateo, Calif. – September 24, 2007

Core News Facts:

• Actuate today announced the launch of BIRT Exchange (www.birt-exchange.com), a dedicated resource for the Eclipse BIRT developer community and the Actuate BIRT product line. The growth of the Eclipse BIRT developer community and BIRT’s increased use in enterprise deployments has created demand for supported products and services based on Eclipse BIRT.

• BIRT Exchange fulfils this need by providing a dedicated site where developers can learn about support and services for Eclipse BIRT, download Actuate BIRT products and participate in the growing Eclipse BIRT eco-system. Developers can share code and expertise with peers, helping to accelerate the flow of knowledge and information within the community.

BIRT Exchange:

• Gives the BIRT developer community centralized access to the broadest range of resources and knowledge related to BIRT.
• Enables developers to easily share, comment on, rate and quickly pinpoint the information they need - technical articles and tips, report designs, even code samples - using simple keyword search combined with a powerful filtering and a community rating system. Resources are grouped by interest area - such as designing and deploying reports, enabling interactive end-user reporting - and can be sorted by rating, author, date, etc.

Available on BIRT Exchange:

• DevX — a dynamic content hub where BIRT developers can quickly find, share and discover useful BIRT-related technical information including code snippets, report designs, technical tips, tutorials and more. DevX makes it fast and easy for developers to search, upload, download and rate content items.
• Searchable forums — on Eclipse BIRT and the Actuate BIRT product line, including a mirror of the Eclipse BIRT newsgroup, which is also searchable.
• Software downloads and detailed product information — for Eclipse BIRT, and the Actuate BIRT product line enabling rapid report deployment, spreadsheet reporting and ad-hoc end user reporting.
• Documentation — official documentation for Eclipse BIRT and Actuate BIRT products.
• Demos — a collection of self-running learning tools on everything from AJAX interactivity for BIRT reports, ad-hoc reporting with BIRT templates, spreadsheet reporting, using sub-reports, parameters, parallel reporting and more.
• Wiki & Blog —facilitates an active dialogue among the BIRT developer community.
• Products – ability to learn about and download the Actuate BIRT product line for enabling enterprise deployment, end user reporting and spreadsheet reporting.

• Support Resources – information on support, services and training available for Eclipse BIRT and the Actuate BIRT product line.

About BIRT

The Eclipse BIRT project is a top level Eclipse Foundation project initiated and led by Actuate with the goal of providing a powerful and flexible reporting design tool for application and report developers. To date, Eclipse BIRT has surpassed one million downloads and has a large, active and growing developer community across all types of organizations. Major software companies such as IBM, BEA, Borland and Zend have incorporated BIRT into their product lines.

IBM: http://www.actuate.com/ready_for_rational BEA: http://e-docs.bea.com/alcs/docs51/pdf/devguide_alcs51.pdf Borland: http://www.borland.com/us/products/silk/silkcentral_test/ Zend: http://www.zend.com/products/zend_platform/features_comparison/birt

Related Online Resources:
Ask BIRT video: www.birt-exchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?cid=2&lid=143 BIRT 2.2 video with indexed menu: www.birt-exchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?cid=2&lid=163 Interview conducted by Michael Coté, RedMonk: www.birt-exchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/singlefile.php?cid=2&lid=162 BIRT on Ohloh: http://www.ohloh.net/projects/490?p=Eclipse+BIRT Actuate Del.icio.us page – http://del.icio.us/Actuate Summary of Actuate’s 2007 Open Source Software Survey: http://www.actuate.com/open_source_survey BIRT Exchange Screenshots: http://www.actuate.com/images/BIRT-Exchange-screenshots.zip Actuate Logo: http://www.actuate.com/images/Acrgb.gif

BIRT Exchange Quick Links:
BIRT Exchange: http://www.birtexchange.com/ User-generated content: www.birtexchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/index.php?contenttype=-1 Support for BIRT: http://birt-exchange.com/html/support/services.php Info on designing BIRT reports: www.birtexchange.com/modules/solutions/solution.php?solution_id=2 Info on deploying BIRT reports: www.birtexchange.com/modules/solutions/solution.php?solution_id=5 Info on enabling end user reporting: www.birtexchange.com/modules/solutions/solution.php?solution_id=3 BIRT developer forums: http://www.birtexchange.com/modules/forum/ Demos on BIRT capabilities and BIRT-related products: www.birtexchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/index.php?contenttype=1 Downloads of BIRT and BIRT-related products: www.birtexchange.com/modules/wfdownloads/staticdls_index.php BIRT Exchange blog: http://www.birt-exchange.com/modules/wordpress/ Eclipse BIRT web site: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/

Quotes:

Attributable to Virgil Dodson, Java Reporting Evangelist at Actuate Corporation “Eclipse BIRT and the Actuate BIRT product line are a powerful combination of tools that let Java developers spend their time doing what they do best: creating innovative and impactful applications,” said Virgil Dodson, Java Reporting Evangelist, Actuate Corporation. “BIRT Exchange gives developers a place to share and learn from peers about the latest and greatest technology and techniques for adding reporting to their applications, so that they can more easily meet their end-users’ reporting needs.”

Attributable to Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation “BIRT has been one of the most popular and successful projects at Eclipse since its initiation by Actuate in 2004“, said Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation. “BIRT has successfully grown a large community of developers around it, and has helped extend the Eclipse ecosystem into enterprise reporting.”

Attributable to Mark Lynd, President, Firescope “When we first used BIRT to embed reporting within the Firescope platform, we were under time pressure and needed to quickly come up to speed and to understand our different options, “ said Mark Lynd, President of Firescope. “BIRT Exchange would have saved Firescope a lot of time and frustration and made life easier. This is going to be an invaluable resource for any BIRT developer.”

Keywords: Actuate, Business Intelligence, BI, Java Reporting, J2EE reporting, Java reports, J2EE reports, Java reporting Tool, J2EE reporting tool, Java reporting engine, J2EE reporting engine, BIRT, Eclipse Foundation, Actuate BIRT, Jason Weathersby, Open Source Digg this: http://www.digg.com/submit Add to del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/post?url Technorati: http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/actuatereddit: http://reddit.com/submit DZone: http://www.dzone.com/links/add.html

About Actuate