Solving your data visualization needs with open source reporting

Most of applications have some types of data visualization needs:

- Gather the data.

- Perform calculation, sort, group, aggregate, total,..

- Present information professionally.

and meeting user demand is crucial to the success of an application.

To solve this problem, there are some different approaches:

- Buy a closed-source commercial product (for example, Crystal Reports, JReport,..), we must to pay for a lot of features but maybe more of features we don't need.

- Build a custom-developed solution, so we need a team to develop our solution but the problem is how much time and money that we need to spend for that.

Nowaday, open source creates new choices. Firstly, we can leverage open source in a customer solution by plug-in it to our solution. Secondly, we can build open-source-based products by using open source code.

There are many open source reporting tools for use in the enterprise such as BIRT, iReport, JasperReports,...

In this post, I would like to introduce BIRT that works pretty well for solving the data visualization needs.

"BIRT is an open source software project that provides the BIRT technology platform to create data visualizations and reports that can be embedded into rich client and web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. BIRT is a top-level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community".