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It is time to select the community favorite for February’s best DevShare contribution. This month’s eligible contest candidates are:

1. DashBIRT 1.0 - Designing BIRT Reports, by cypherdj
2. Designing a Master/Detail Report with BIRT - Designing BIRT Reports, by AndrewSYIQ

Contest voting is open to the entire BIRT Exchange community. If you haven’t done so already, please take a look at these submissions and vote here. Your vote is important and helps show community support for our valued DevShare contributors.

Note that you must be logged in to vote. The poll closes at 2:30pm Pacific time on March 16, 2010. Contest rules can  be found on the DevShare Contributor of the Month Wiki page.

One of the nice benefits of the BIRT Exchange Marketplace is that it is a great showcase for some really cool things you can do with BIRT. The BIRT Mashboard is an excellent example of how BIRT can be leveraged in rich information applications to create world class solutions. This fully featured app is designed for managers who need to make decisions based on varied cuts of business data. Specifically, the BIRT Mashboard allows executives to create their own custom dashboards and data visualizations with interactive drill-down capabilities.

The BIRT Mashboard starts with a blank canvas that can be populated with pre-defined controls called portlets to construct a page of interactive BIRT charts, tables, graphs and other data elements that describe your (and others’) data. No programming knowledge is required to make the page – just drag and drop portlets from a palette to the canvas and it just works. Once these portlets are placed on the canvas, they adapt dynamically to each other based on the user’s actions.

As an example, let’s say that three portlets exist on your canvas, the first is a pie chart that divides your company’s total sales by region, the second is a table that lists total sales by product line and a third is a map that marks each of your sales offices worldwide. Since the portlets communicate, you can click on one of the regions in the pie chart and the table next to it changes from showing a global representation of product line sales to just the data for that region. The map also shifts from a world view to show a regional view – plus, in this example, adds pins for each customer located there. Clicking on one of those pins then pops up a list of your products purchased by that customer as well as a contact name and phone number.

The BIRT Mashboard comes with some predefined portlets and more can be created by developers and analysts. These portlets are able to pull data from many different sources (internal and external) and inter-portlet communication is managed by simple javascripting. Once created, these portlets can be reused across many custom dashboards and reports, and security and scalability is ensured by Actuate’s backend iServer technology.

Note that you can present content built in BIRT and served by the iServer right alongside any other web accessible content too. The BIRT Mashboard allows you full control of your own application experience. Whether that content is built inside BIRT or not, the BIRT Mashboard brings it all together in a cohesive easy-to-use interface.

I encourage you to take a look at the Overview video (under the BIRT Mashboard demo tab) and then download the app and try it out. You can find 6 separate ten minute how-to videos (also under the demo tab) to help you get started.

Don’t have an iServer? No problem, you can get a free trial version of iServer Express from BIRT Exchange or even better, choose the 1 Click Install option for BIRT Mashboard and open a free account on the new BIRT onDemand service which will set up and pre-configure everything you need at no cost to evaluate the BIRT Mashboard on our servers.

And please don’t forget to let us know what you think of the BIRT Mashboard or any other apps you evaluate on the BIRT Exchange Marketplace by adding your comments under their corresponding review tabs.

It’s still not too late to submit your proposal to the contest…

What can you do to show how well BIRT and Adobe technologies complement each other? Make your proposal by March 10th and if selected, you have until May 19th to complete an implementation and submit it to the BIRT Exchange Marketplace for a share in the $5,000 prize pool. All we need at this stage is just the proposal (no code) that describes your idea.

To Get Started

Take a look at Dan Melcher’s blog and review the FAQ and Rules for contest eligibility and requirements.a

If you are an Adobe technology developer who is not familiar with BIRT, please check out:
http://www.actuate.com/be/news-events/resources/?articleid=19113

If you’re a BIRT developer who needs some help getting started with Adobe technologies, please see:
http://www.actuate.com/be/news-events/resources/?articleid=19114

Once familiar with the contest, sit back and let your creativity soar. What can you or your team do to showcase these two great technologies?

How to Enter

When you’ve come up with a good idea, write it up and submit your proposal as an e-mail message or attachment to contests@birt-exchange.com.

Each proposal should contain all the following info:

1. For each team member, indicate Name, Address, E-mail Address.
2. For each team member, please state technical experience or qualifications.
3. Describe what your software will do.
4. Which Adobe and BIRT technologies will be integrated. For BIRT technology, please be sure to specify whether Eclipse or Actuate (commercial) BIRT technology will be used.
5. What platforms and environments will be supported or required by your software?
6. Which BIRT and Adobe features/interfaces and functionality will be used?
7. What benefits will your software provide to developers and/or application users?
8. Please specify in detail what tasks your software will perform when it’s complete. These are the “completeness criteria” which will be used to evaluate whether your finished software achieves its intended goal.

Note that full descriptions of the proposal requirements are listed in the Contest Rules. Please refer to section 3 (How To Enter) of these rules before completing the information above.

If you have any questions or concerns, please send e-mail to contests@birt-exchange.com.

We look forward to seeing some awesome proposals!

Almost a year ago, Actuate invited several members of the BIRT community to assist us in our efforts to build up the BIRT Exchange community site and address the needs of its membership. The advisors have been very helpful in giving us feedback on site improvements and providing input as representatives of the community. We are extremely grateful for their patience and support over this last year.

Now with over 26,000 registered BIRT Exchange members, we have decided to formalize this group of advisors and create the BIRT Exchange Community Advisory Council. This council will be made up of nine active BIRT Exchange members and three Actuate members who will work together to help guide the evolution and growth of the BIRT Exchange community.

A draft Charter for this new Community Advisory Council has been posted on the BIRT Exchange Wiki and I encourage you to take a look at it and send me your comments and feedback. We’ve asked the current advisors to kick it off as founding council members and during the next few weeks we’ll invite additional active community people to join. The Charter will be finalized once we have full council membership.

You can expect to see some exciting changes in the BIRT Exchange community site over the next few weeks as we roll out a new forum system, mailing lists to support collaboration, BIRT–related blog aggregation and a new Community home page — to name just a few things in the works. I expect the new Council will be instrumental in giving us the input we’ll need to ensure these changes are well received and beneficial to the BIRT community.

The winner of the DevShare Contributor of the Month Contest for January 2010 is Evgeny Sitnikov for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: BIRT best practice.

Evgeny said, “The document I provided contains a number of useful examples (HTML/JS integration, Google Maps, Scripting, Logging, Localisation, Scripted Data Set) for building advanced BIRT reports. I decided to create it after I have worked with BIRT for several months and have been continuously receiving help on different problems from the BIRT Exchange community. My purpose was it to give back the acquired knowledge in a structured way.”

Evgeny is in his final year of studies and was working with BIRT on a project during his internship. He is planning to use BIRT during another project in the future.

Evgeny chose a silver iPod Shuffle for his award.

The winner of the DevShare Contributor of the Year for the period June 1, 2009 through December 31, 2009 is Huw Bradfield for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Browse a Database with BIRT.

Huw said, “My DevShare entry is a tutorial and report design for a browser based database viewer, designed to provide an easy and intuitive method for non-database administrators to view entire database tables as well as to find specific information without requiring extensive SQL knowledge. I was given the task of simplifying the existing system for finding and diagnosing errors in the Websphere MQ based system at my workplace. In a typical day there will be 10 to 15 thousand entries added into our databases, with perhaps 1500 exception entries and no easy method of finding these errors.

“While existing database log browsers exist, research showed that none of them were ideal. They either gave too many privileges to the end-user (write access), were too complicated, did not have the correct functionality or were too costly to implement. We chose to use a Business Intelligence suite instead of writing a custom web-app so we could leverage the other capabilities such as standardised reports and charting.”

Huw is a Middleware developer specialising the Websphere MQ and Message Broker software line, although he recently transitioned to a web-development role. Huw has only been using Business Intelligence Tools for 5 months and BIRT for 4. Beyond writing and extending the log browser he has written a number of other standard reports to display performance and error summary information. Huw is currently waiting for Integration and UAT testing to complete before he transitions back to BIRT development and future work will probably involve integrating BIRT and the log-browser into a custom web-based administrator tool for message broker.

For his award, Huw will receive a gift certificate to Amazon.com worth $250.

Congratulations Huw!

The winner of the DevShare Contributor of the Month Contest for December 2009 is John Ward for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: Working with Extension Points: Aggregations.

John said, “The article is written as first in a series of article discussing how to work with BIRTs extension points. I am trying to get the word out that BIRT is capable of doing so much more than what it does out of the box, and one of the keys to BIRTs flexibility are these extension points. I figured the best starting place would be with either the Aggregations or the User Script Libraries. As I hadn’t worked with the new extension model in BIRT 2.3+, I decided to start there.”

John is a BIRT consultant at Innovent Solutions, and the author of Practical Data Analysis and Reporting with BIRT. He has been working with BIRT since the beta phase in 2004/2005. He currently focuses on helping clients integrate BIRT into their applications and optimize report designs.

John chose a black iPod Shuffle for his award.

There are just a few days left for you to vote on December’s best DevShare contribution. This month’s contest candidates are:

1. Working with Extension Points: Aggregations - Designing BIRT Reports, by johnw
2. How to use Maven with Birt - Deploying BIRT Reports, by mxc
3. Wicket and Birt Integration - Deploying BIRT Reports, by mxc

The contest voting is open to the entire BIRT Exchange community. Please take a look at these submissions and vote here. Note that you must be logged in to vote. The poll closes at noon Pacific time on January 14, 2010.

Notice: We decided to delay announcing the Best DevShare Contribution of the Year Award until after the voting for this December contest is over. At that time we will announce the 2009 nominees and open up community voting for the winner [Edit: My error, the winner will be selected by determining the most popular submission — not by a poll.]. So stay tuned…

I want to thank everyone who participated this year in making BIRT Exchange the most active online BIRT-related community in the world!

I’m looking forward to 2010. You can expect some exciting things to happen in and around BIRT Exchange.

First of all, we have plans in place for improvements to the BIRT Community site that should be rolled out during the next few months:

• improved home page featuring a better layout with links to additional content
• more BIRT-related blogs and bloggers
• enhancements to search to help locate interesting things more easily
• member recognition capabilities to show off those who are top contributors and leaders in the BIRT Exchange community
• social networking feeds
• . . . and lots more!

I’m planning to host periodic live chats with developers, BIRT evangelists and community folks by using a free on-line service to exchange ideas, ask questions and meet some of the folks who are active on BIRT Exchange (I’m currently evaluating TalkShoe). I have no dates set yet, but the first one will probably occur sometime during the first quarter of 2010.

Other things you may find of interest:

Paul Bappoo and Ben Best have plans underway to start the first BIRT User Group (BUG) in London, England. The date is set for January 28th and the location and time will be determined soon. If you’re interested in participating, please register at the birt-reporting.com site.

Jason Weathersby has a webinar titled Integrating BIRT within your Applications coming up on January 26th at 9am Pacific time.

Courtney Claussen at Sybase has posted an overview of BIRT that they’ve just included as part of their IQ product suite. Check it out.

Actuate is sponsoring Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and pages. Friend/fan/follow them (and search #birt on Twitter) to keep up with the latest news about BIRT and BIRT Exchange.

Keep your eyes on the App Showcase on the BIRT Exchange Open Marketplace. More apps are added every week and it’s a great place to find cool things developers have done with BIRT for sale or free download. Add one yourself to show your own BIRT prowess and/or make some money.

Oh… and don’t forget December’s DevShare Contributor of the Month Contest. There is still time to submit your entry to win an iPod, BIRT books or a cool sound activated “BIRT Rocks!” light-up T-shirt! There are not many entries this month (note that Actuate employees are ineligible), so your chances of winning are pretty good.

I wish you all the best for this holiday season!

-Ray

The winner of the DevShare Contributor of the Month Contest for October 2009 is Paul Bappoo for his contribution to BIRT Exchange titled: BIRT - A Newbies Perspective.

Paul said, “I wrote this brief introduction to BIRT from a new user’s perspective because I had been invited to the IBM Maximo UK and Ireland user group meeting and in return for the invitation I promised to “give something back” to the group, rather than simply turn up and use it as an opportunity to sell my Maximo financial systems integration services to the group members. When I saw the BIRT demonstration I was very impressed and having spoken to some of the group members, I realised that BIRT was new to them and that a review would be useful to the group. So often busy people have little time to invest in learning a new technology or product so I hoped to solve this problem by creating a simple, quick to read overview. It would seem, from the feedback I have received that I was successful in this endeavor.”

Paul has been a software consultant for over 20 years and has always been interested in computers, technology and business. He has been using BIRT for the last couple months from the perspective of writing about it. He has not yet had the chance to use BIRT for any serious business applications, but expects that to change in the near future as more opportunities open up.

Since creating his first BIRT report, Paul has written a number of guides, reviews and tutorials on BIRT and set up BirtReporting.com as a vehicle to bring this material to a wider audience. Paul says, “I have been astounded by the positive reaction to this site and by the help and support being offered by Actuate. This has been great fun for me so far so winning this competition is icing on the cake!”

Paul chose an iPod for his award.

It’s not too late… to get your own DevShare article posted in time for the next month’s contest which closes on November 30th. If you’ve cooked up something that you can share with the BIRT Exchange community, please post it soon! You can create a tutorial like Paul, build a BIRT application, template or component, or write up some of the tips and solutions to problems you’ve run into during the past – anything that’s helped you use BIRT more effectively will probably be useful to others too.  And don’t forget the BIRT Exchange Open Marketplace. A code-based DevShare submission could be a good candidate for the Marketplace as well.

The monthly DevShare contest rules and list of previous winners can be found here.