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[ormf-dev] The Publisher and reporting
Hi,

As you know I am busily working through all of the ORMF library dependencies to get EF approval for redistribution. This has forced my hand as when to bring up the Publisher (and reporting in general) for discussion. 

We are presently using Apache Struts. B. and I decided sometime back to get rid of it and in general to rethink the whole approach to publishing/reporting. The issue is that Struts is not being used by any other EF project and I feel that it is inappropriate to ask the EMO IP team to go through the work of checking the entire framework only to have us abandon usage of it in a few months. Therefore I have decided not to check in the Publishing module. If per chance any of you want play with that code, I can always email you a copy of it, but it cannot be checked in to the repository or the build will break.

This makes deciding on the replacement technology a high priority. B. and I have already done a fair amount of thinking on this and came to the conclusion that BIRT was the right tool for the job. I do, however, want to open this up for discussion. Does anyone have alternative technologies they think should be considered?

Here are a few of our reasons for wanting to go with BIRT:

    1. BIRT is an Eclipse project!

    2. It is robust, well documented and mature.

    3. It comes with a Designer for creating reports. This means that not only are our lives made easier, but we can easily allow users and adopters to modify and customise existing reports, and to create new custom reports.

    4. It satisfies our needs not only for publishing, but also for the wide variety of reports that we see as being valuable downstream. 

    5. Out of the box we get XHTML, PDF, Word DOC/RTF and XLS.

    6. It has a charting engine that will add value to our management reports.

Your thoughts and opinions are desired.

All the best,
Joel

P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail. Thank you.

http://www.etish.org                                                                     http://www.eclipse.org/ormf

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