[udig-devel] BIRT Charts and Integration ideas

[Jody Garnett]

Thanks for the very interesting insight. The uDig printing framework has 
not gone anywhere; indeed we are hacking around it for our current PDF 
export.

If you would like to "out" your work thus far as a community plugin I 
will schedule a code reivew and so forth for the uDig 1.2 development 
stream. I am excited it is great to see the community plugin idea work 
out. Your company would still have (c) in the headers; but it would be 
great if you were happy with an LGPL license (so things do not get any 
more confusing for other developers).

Since we ship uDig with a custom JRE and have the settings under our 
control the PermSpace requirement should not slow us down.

Cheers,
Jody


Vince Darley wrote:
> I think overall it would be a very good idea.  We've been generally 
> impressed with BIRT's flexibility and capabilities (and ability to 
> scale - it happily churns out pdf reports with 3500 pages for example 
> (not that such a large report is much use)) - and the report designer 
> is pretty nice.  The only thing that is mediocre is its Java API for 
> extending it (or at least the documentation and ease of use of it -- 
> the actual extension API seems very powerful since it was designed, I 
> think, for the birt charting framework).
>
> I've not really used udig's built in printing mechanisms much, so I'm 
> not too sure how much work would be required to reproduce that on top 
> of BIRT.  The little I did see seemed pretty much out of the box stuff 
> in BIRT.
>
> Using BIRT will of course provide a whole host of additional benefits 
> - it can easily talk to most databases, so any additional reporting 
> driven off users' databases can be simply integrated into their reports.
>
> The negatives I can think of are:
>
> 1) As far as I could tell BIRT is mostly developed by one company, so 
> while it has a very large user base, the development base is small.
>
> 2) It's a large framework, so uDig's memory footprint (and java 
> 'PermSpace' requirements in particular) would go up.
>
> cheers,
>
> Vince.
>
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