BIRT-ing Out Loud

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.

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!

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!

Today, Actuate announced a contest to build the coolest app, solution or component with BIRT and Adobe technologies.

The press release describes the details and prizes of the contest. Some helpful resource pages are provided with integration points between the two technologies.

I think the combination of these two powerful RIA technologies will result in something spectacular. How could it not? Integrating the best of Flex into BIRT, or the best of BIRT into Flex is going to make something zing. The creativity of developers today is off the charts, as well as their skills. I can’t wait to see what happens.

Come showcase your talent, get tons of free marketing opportunities for your creation, and win some money.
Fame, free distribution, and fortune. I think you can handle that…

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…

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.

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

1. BIRT - A Newbies Perspective - Articles - BIRT Exchange by bappoo
2. Ad-Hoc Database Browser Report - Tutorials - BIRT Exchange by Happy
3. Actuate BIRT review - Articles - BIRT Exchange by bappoo
4. Reports with printable table of contents - Designs & Code - BIRT Exchange by jfire_birt
5. Eclipse Plugin - Maximo Report Generator for BIRT Reports - Designs & Code - BIRT Exchange by voller

We have opened the contest voting to the entire BIRT Exchange community. Please take a look at the submissions and add your vote here.