Birt Open Source VS Birt PRO

quincyj

Hello,

I'm working with Birt 2.5.2 (Open source) for few month now. Someone told me that this version had many bugs but he couldn't tell me more... For the moment I used Birt to generate few html and pdf reports and I think it works very well. But can you tell me if there are many bugs correction in Birt 2.6. Moreovere what's the differences between opensource and profesionnal version of Birt in terms of bugs correction?

Thank you very much

johnw

In terms of general functionality, BIRT 2.6 tended to be a little "flakier" in my opinion. 2.6.1 was a lightyear ahead in terms of functionality and stability. In fact, Actuate 11 is based on the 2.6.1 engine. Whoever told you that BIRT 2.5.2 was "buggy" was mistaken, it was the most stable of the 2.5.x series branch, and is a solid workhorse in many OEM and custom installations in use in production environments. If your curious about any open bugs for any of the revisions, feel free to check the BIRT Bugzilla over at http://www.eclipse.org/birt to get an idea.

To understand what your getting with Actuate BIRT vs Eclipse BIRT, you need to understand the BIRT framework. BIRT itself is a specification on report designs, and a collection of API's for running, rendering reports, charts, and designing reports. With Eclipse BIRT, you get the designer built on the design engine API, and a basic example view written on top of the report engine api, with the basic chart extension. With a JDBC, xml, flat data source, and web service ODA for connecting to data sources, and a basic viewer for deploying into your environment.

Actuate BIRT is a series of products built on top the BIRT engine, written by the folks who do the main development of the BIRT framework. In addition to the features listed above, you also have the BIRT interactive viewer, which allows you to do things like add groups, filters, and cross tab manipulations at view time on the fly, the Flash Charts, which is an extended chart feature that provides charts using Flash for extended interactivity such as dynamic drill down of chart data without needing to re-run reports, cross tab drill downs, and their incredibly awesome iServer products, which allow for multi-user, enterprise level report generation, with versioning, multi-user folders, integration with LDAP, database, or other user repositories, Business Reports Studio, which is a BIRT based, web reports designer aimed at power users that allows them to design their own simple reports, and the BIRT 360 Dashboard, which lets users design their own dashboards and mashups.

There is a lot of marketing speak there, so if your curious about it, I'd check the Actuate web site at http://www.actuate.com, or attend one of the webinars that the put on about once a month.

John