Evaluation of Birt

psable

Hi all,
I am evaluating few reporting tools for our internal application. My evaluation criteria are as follows:
1) Connection to multiple database to show data in single chart
2) UI features as good as it can be
3) API Control (preferably Java)
4) Integration with other java web apps
5) Ad hoc reporting
6) Access control
I am evaluating Birt, Jasper, Pentaho and Crystal Report. As I can not really learn in short time about all these four tools can someone tell me from his experience that which of these tools can fulfil above mentioned requiements ?

Thanks,
Prashant

Virgil Dodson

Hi Prashant,

I can give the BIRT answers to these questions.

1) Connection to multiple database to show data in single chart
Yes, possible in BIRT... multiple data sources, multiple data sets, and joint data set.

2) UI features as good as it can be
Of course, BIRT gets lots of cuddos for good looking UI and nice web viewer

3) API Control (preferably Java)
you can control BIRT reports with Java or JavaScript event handlers.

4) Integration with other java web apps
BIRT is quite extensible allowing for integration at multiple levels... for instance, BIRT Scripted Data source allows reports to consume application data... and BIRT viewer is easily integrated with web app, or can be deployed as war and called with URLs

5) Ad hoc reporting
BIRT can be built to do this with drop-down selections... and parameterized reports... or for a more robust solution, use the Design Engine API. Actuate has built an ad-hoc report designer called BIRT Report Studio so it is possible.

6) Access control
The open source BIRT engine allows you to run reports from your application so it inherits your application security. If you are looking for out-of-the-box access control, then you should look at BIRT Deployment Kit, or iServer Express.

Others may have comments related to the other tools you are evaluating.