Re: [udig-devel] BIRT Charts and Integration ideas

[Vince Darley <vince.darley@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jody,

At 18:49 03/12/2007, Jody Garnett wrote:
> What is your opinion on throwing out our existing udig printing and 
> going with the BIRT based solution you describe? I have no real 
> desire to maintain a report builder in uDig now that BIRT actually exists.

I think overall it would be a very good idea.  We've been generally 
impressed with BIRT's flexibility and capabilities (and ability to 
scale - it happily churns out pdf reports with 3500 pages for example 
(not that such a large report is much use)) - and the report designer 
is pretty nice.  The only thing that is mediocre is its Java API for 
extending it (or at least the documentation and ease of use of it -- 
the actual extension API seems very powerful since it was designed, I 
think, for the birt charting framework).

I've not really used udig's built in printing mechanisms much, so I'm 
not too sure how much work would be required to reproduce that on top 
of BIRT.  The little I did see seemed pretty much out of the box stuff in BIRT.

Using BIRT will of course provide a whole host of additional benefits 
- it can easily talk to most databases, so any additional reporting 
driven off users' databases can be simply integrated into their reports.

The negatives I can think of are:

1) As far as I could tell BIRT is mostly developed by one company, so 
while it has a very large user base, the development base is small.

2) It's a large framework, so uDig's memory footprint (and java 
'PermSpace' requirements in particular) would go up.

cheers,

Vince.