Hi John,
Hi everybody,
I’ll take up John’s mail in his numbering:
1.) I’am working on a new home page, starting from the actual one, updating, structuring the pages, supplementing new info… Once this job done (I’ll probably will need one more week), I think it will be a good time to send the good message into the world J. I could put some predominant text on the birt/homepage. Does anybody have a good idea which text I could use?
2.1) @John: I like your propositions and ideas. We in the OSBP project had the same idea and already have implemented a customizable (!) DSL to generate reports. Explanation see below.
2.2.) See above at 2.1)
3.1 + 3.2) Very good. Looking forward to be able to use it.
OSBP: I am the sponsor of the OSBP project. Due to some legal problems between American and German legislation, for the moment we stopped committing, but we will restart once Eclipse moved to Europe. OSBP is a Spin-off (dual license) of big parts of OS.bee (www.osbee.org). I you are interested let me know I will procure you a personal access.
The idea of OSBP / OS.bee (OSBP - Home (eclipse.org) is the following: implementing software normally makes it necessary to integrate different frameworks…. as you all know our common business. I won’t explain. Besides of having to learn all the necessary frameworks, many times we replicate the same processes during software development. I guess that John’s proposition 2.1 and 2.2 are motivated by these facts.
The idea behind OSBP, which we have developed in the last 8 years and which integrates our 35 years of software engineering, is
1.) Repetitive work shall be concatenated into customizable DSL acronyms/tokens, in other words instead of repeating all the time the same working steps, let’s have the DSL-robot do the work.
2.) All frameworks shall be handled with a similar grammar making the approach to framework a lot easier letting few specialist handle framework specific concerns.
3.) A DSL is the link between programming and organization, so it should have a grammar that even less experienced IT people can use.
4.) To involve the (end)users we have formed a working group (OSbea) in which both developers and users can join. We want to develop software that can be used by users as a result. In this context, from my point of view, point 3 of John is to be integrated.
5.) Last but not least, we want to use the OS.bea Working Group to motivate the projects that are currently acting separately to work together and derive benefits from this for each project.
Meanwhile we have first professional software based on OSBP (see gallery there). (For you info: On the previous version we have about. 50.000 users running).
And if you are interested I can tell you more about our experience with it and where the advantages and disadvantages are .
So to come back to John’s proposition. Maybe we can help on his topic 2.1
Best
Christophe
Von: birt-dev [mailto:birt-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] Im Auftrag von john@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Gesendet: Samstag, 20. März 2021 02:57
An: For developers on the BIRT project
Betreff: Re: [birt-dev] First light
This is awesome. I remember when I ran into issues, it had something to do with the ordering of how things were downloaded from Maven, and Orbit had to be the first thing, otherwise the build ended up with issues like the viewer not working, and certain dialogs being broken. I'd be curious to know how you fixed it. I'll download it a little later on and check it out. This is great news.
Sorry I have been a little light on commenting. We're still working on the big on getting me into the approver system. But once that is done, there are a few areas I'd like to discuss with the group at large.
- Getting the community back: I'd like us to go forward with the "We're Back" message ("BIRT Is Back, Baby!!"???), and to petition some more committers to get involved with the project.
- Once I can commit again, I have several contributions I'd like to finally add into the project that I've sat on to keep in my toolkit, but I think it's time to bring them to the community at large. These include an XML emitter, a JPEG emitter, and a JSON emitter. With that I do have a few other projects I'd like to try to introduce, and see if we can't grow them out, such as:
- The BIRT Simple Domain Language: This was an initial grammer and implementation of a "SQL" like language that would dynamically build and execute BIRT reports. So with a statement like:
create (and run) (report/library/template)
(using library (library)) (based on template (template))
with (SQL "select * from customers")
(group (and aggregate on column) on column)
(save as (emitter id))
That was the "gist" of it. The grammer might have been a little different since it's been several years since I've looked at it. But it worked really well as both a standalone language and a designer plugin that would automatically create report designs. It was based on another API I had written called the BSD, or BIRT Simplified Design API. This had a lot of applications, such as the simple scripting from CLI's for reports without needing the designer, quick uptimes, dynamic report creation when you had a SQL statement you needed a report to dynamically build columns for, and a few other things.
What do you think, any interest into introducing this into the project? - A few add-on tools I had written, such as the style stripper, which would recursively remove all styles from a report design (useful when you have to "troubleshoot" someones report design), the RPTDOCUMENT Data Source Troubleshooting tool, which would take a RPTDOCUMENT from a report, extract the original report design, and clone each of the report data sources with the executed version stored in the RPTDOCUMENT. Also useful for troubleshooting.
Again, any interest in introducing these things into the tool?
- Long term I'd like to look at enhacements, once we get the bugs addressed. The top two are:
- Improved generation lifecycle enhancements
- Introducing new emitters, in particular a HTML5/CSS framework for better report integration and to replace the aging HTML2 model we have now.
Any thoughts?
-John
The viewer issue is also fixed:
I have a full BIRT running in 4.19
Before installing BIRT, also add the jetty 9x repo to the list of update sites
Let me know if you have issues.
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