Toys ‘r’ Welcome, And Le’go my Legos

EddieC 0 254 Views

Attention marketing professionals: Sending cute toys along with press releases is a good way to get me to notice them. I received a package today from Actuate, which makes RIA and business intelligence tools. In addition to news about BIRT-based Actuate 10, which I’ll get to in a minute, the package contained a small Lego robotic space-man kit. I love Legos, and so does my 11-year-old son. He and I have spent countless hours constructing vehicles and small buildings with the small plastic geometric building blocks.

A half-dozen fully-constructed space ships and terrestrial vehicles currently adorn Nick’s bedroom, embarking frequently on voyages to the surrounding universe of our home. And since the kit has a nominal dollar value, I'm not required to return it by the rules of my employer. So tonight I’ll have the pleasure of giving Nick a space-man to assemble. The space-man will likely command an X-Wing Fighter, or perhaps the Mars rover-looking thing.

Actuate 10, the latest version of the company's flagship reporting tool is based on the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, an early and now mature Eclipse project that was founded in 2004 by Actuate and the Eclipse Foundation. BIRT consists of an Eclipse-based report designer, charting engine and runtime, and is intended to allow developers to easily add reporting to Web applications. It's open source and works particularly well with Java.

I don't know too much ahead of the official announcement on Monday (Nov. 10), but I can tell you that new features will include Ajax-based report viewing that is customizable by the end-user, content and external app integration and mash-up capabilities through a new JavaScript API, Flash-based charts and widgets and page-level security.

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Light marketing aside (as noted), the practical work for developers is integrating and operating a reporting stack inside a Java web app. The notes below collect concise, hands-on checks and fixes that are commonly missed during evaluation or when trying a vendor beta (see ) or when checking which version is in use (as asked).

Checklist for embedding a reporting engine into a Java web app:

  • Decide deployment model: embedded engine (library inside the app) versus remote/report server; pick the one that fits scaling, isolation, and upgrade strategy.
  • Keep dependency hygiene: avoid duplicate vendor jars in container-wide libs; prefer WEB-INF/lib or an isolated classloader.
  • Place DB drivers and connection pools under app control and verify connection/test queries separately from report runtime.
  • Use relative resource resolution for images, fonts and subreports; avoid hard absolute file paths in report designs.
  • Verify rendering across target outputs (HTML, PDF, Excel) early — assumptions that work in HTML often break in PDF.
  • Treat report parameters like any external input: validate types, limit lengths, and prefer parameter binding over SQL string concatenation.

Common causes and quick fixes:

  • NoClassDefFoundError or ClassNotFoundException: remove duplicate jars from the container, check classloader isolation.
  • Missing charts or blank images: confirm renderer libraries and font availability; ensure temp/output dirs are writable and mapped correctly.
  • Slow reports: paginate queries, push filtering into SQL, enable caching of static datasets, and tune JVM heap before chasing elusive engine tuning knobs.
  • Formatting/locale glitches: include required fonts on the server and set consistent locale/encoding for render runs.

Practical upgrade/testing workflow: keep report designs in source control, build a small automated harness that renders canonical reports to the same set of outputs and compares results (checksums or visual diffs), and run that harness against vendor betas in an isolated test container so rollback is simple.

Member Avatar for vdodson
vdodson 0 Newbie Poster

Hi Eddie, you don't actually have to wait for Actuate 10 to be released, you can download a beta version at

Virgil

Member Avatar for malkhaz
malkhaz -29 Newbie Poster

Nice article. What is the current version?

Edited by Dani because: Plug snipped
Member Avatar for malkhaz
malkhaz -29 Newbie Poster

This post seems to be more about kids construction toys then BI software :) - so here is the :)

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