Is BIRT the right tool for me?

ehnolte

Hi

I am new to BIRT reporting and have to build a set of management reports for a company I am consulting for.
I have used JasperReports in the past but decided to try something else this time. I read the obligatory comparisons I could find and have been experimenting with BIRT for the past few weeks and I have noticed 2 things that give me some concern. Could someone please confirm or preferably deny these assumptions:

Firstly, whenever I come across something that I can not figure out myself and try to google the solution, I find pages that are mostly from 2007 or older - does this imply that things are very stable or that there is not much recent activity within the BIRT community?

Secondly, since the reports that I must generate are for management, they must have a very professional look and feel. I found that I can deliver on this requirement with something like excel with very little effort while I have spent a considerable amount of time trying to make my BIRT reports look good and they still look quite sloppy (btw I am a programmer, not a designer). Is this just me, or do I need to use something like the Actuate tools for my reports to get a more clean cut appearance?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ernst

bappoo

Hi Ernst

I'd be interested to know what you mean by "sloppy" looking results. OK so you're a programmer so would not be the natural person to come up with a great looking design (I know coz I fall into that camp too), but you know what you are looking for because you have seen it before, right? So it appears that the question is what elements of previous reports have you not been able to re-produce with BIRT? I've seen some pretty fancy looking reports based solely on open source BIRT and of course if you move to the Actuate designer you can add in the Flash charts too. Can you expand on what particular report elements you are looking for?

And to get to your first question second (!) there is quite a lot of activity on BIRT-Exchange and BIRTReporting.com right now, but of course the early product issues are now solved and it is only really the new features and advanced stuff that (generally speaking) would be generating the majority of the new topics. Although, having said that we still get a lot of newbie traffic on BIRTReporting.com.

Warm regards

Paul