Jun

5

Deployment of BIRT reports by email

Filed Under devs, Java | 2 Comments

BIRT is a powerful Open Source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools I came to use in the last weeks for a project. Its key features are:

  • Eclipse based report solution
  • Very nice report designer producing a standard xml file. This file can be then used to deploy the report in several ways
  • runtime component for easily serving reports on a server, also by a web server (like Tomcat)
  • outstanding Java APIs for creating and modifying the XML report design (DE API), for consuming and deploying the reports in several ways (RE API) and for creating and rendering charts (CE API)

For creating a BIRT report with the Eclipse environment you can use this very nice tutorial.

For standardizing and templating BIRT reports in an enterprise environment using BIRT report libraries and templates you can read this great article.

For deploying your BIRT reports in various ways there is another great article.

After reading the last article you will find out that there are mainly the following ways to deploy a BIRT report (without using Eclipse):

  • Deploy the report with the BIRT Viewer Servlet
  • Deploy the report with a servlet
  • Using the BIRT Viewer in a RCP Application
  • Using the BIRT Report Engine API in RCP Application

Of course if you want to use BIRT reports in a NOT J2EE application, you can still consider to create some kind of web services.

A very nice and easy way I found to deploy reports to an enterprise is by using the BIRT Viewer Servlet in a servlet engine like Tomcat. This is just a question of deploying the Viewer servlet and the report xml files to the web servlet engine, and it is all. Users will be able to access the real time generated reports in a web based way (with HTML and pdf outputs).

You could have the need to send an email with some reports attached on a regular time manner. For doing so I quickly wrote the following Java class that can be run from the command line.

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Jan

19

Full OSS solution vs OSS/commercial solution mix

Filed Under GIS, PostGIS, ArcObjects, devs, .NET, Java, ZigGis, CMS | 5 Comments

I wanted to leave a comment in this Bill Dollin's post, but after that it came out to my mind to leave a trackback to it, and going with a my own post on this subject as far as I have several things to discuss about.

In the OSS jungle, it looks there are in the last times more and more solutions and projects based on commercial closed-code software. For example zigGIS, the Open Source ArcGIS connector for PostGIS, in which I am involved, is by itself an OS project tied to proprietary frameworks (Microsoft and Esri). This is many times not so good, as I cannot dig, for example, in Esri ArcObjects core code for understanding why a particular issue is coming out.
At my office we are in the process of taking an important strategic decision.
We are going to replace our actual commercial closed-source CMS (Content Managment System) - that we were using for some portals we manage for several years - for an Open Source solution.
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Jun

30

Geometry creation with GeoTools 2 (Java): merge shapefile polygons on a common attribute (polygon geoprocessing)

Filed Under GIS, GeoTools, devs, Java | Comments Off

Here I post a sample java class I developed some months ago, working with geometry creation in GeoTools 2. This class, given an input shapefile, will elaborate an output shapefile merging the input polygons on a common field.

Geotools is an open source (LGPL) Java code library which provides standards compliant methods for the manipulation of geospatial data, for example to implement Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The Geotools library implements Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications as they are developed, in close collaboration with the GeoAPI and GeoWidgets projects. The capabilities of Geotools are presented in the feature list.

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