EclipseCon BIRT Sessions

EclipseCon continues to go really well with a lot of great talks. I have found the OSGi Services talks to be very interesting. Perhaps there are opportunities to add greater flexibility to the BIRT runtime through the adoption of more services for some functions? Going to have to think about that for a while.

On Tuesday Paul Clenahan presented a general intro to BIRT talk to a standing room only crowd. The nice lady at the door had to pull out her baseball bat to turn away the overflow crowd.

In the afternoon Justin Miranda from the OpenMRS team talked about how they are using BIRT to help provide better health care in some of the most difficult places in the world. If you are interested in making a difference, OpenMRS is looking for volunteers. If you are interested, send me an email at (scottr at innoventsolutions dot com) Please leave a comment and I can put you in touch with Justin at OpenMRS.

Jason Weathersby provided an in-depth review of the Chart API's. If you didn't know Jason has spent the last couple of months diving into the chart API's. He has walked through most of the code that makes up the charting plug-ins and he has created his own Chart extension. As a result Jason has really improved the charting chapters in the BIRT Integration book. In addition he provided a really great tutorial on chart scripting. He wrapped it all up with a tour of the chart api's. We will be posting the slides to the web site shortly. If you are interested in charting, make sure you get the second edition of the BIRT Integration book.

Today, I got a preview of the new DTP Query Builder. It won't be available until 2.3 M6, but I think that you will all like the new query builder. Two very cool features:
- re-factoring of the sql query e.g. changing alias names
- ability to dock the query builder as an editor, so that you don't have to continually re-open the dialog.

We also had a series of five really cool BIRT short talks. Virgil Dodson, Pierre Tessier, John Ward, Phillipe Coucaud and Santosh Kumar teamed up to show what can be done to really make BIRT dance. My personal favorite was the way that Phillipe wrapped the BIRT charts with a simple interface and then used it to provide visual feedback about the project.

In five minutes, we will be starting the BIRT BOF, I look forward to having an informal discussion with the BIRT community, I'll let you know how it goes tomorrow.