Actuate Joins Eclipse, Starts Open-Source BI Project

After joining the Eclipse Foundation, the company launches a project to create open-source business intelligence and reporting tools.

Actuate Corp. announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, the organization focused on delivering an open-source development environment, and has launched a new Eclipse project to focus on open-source business intelligence and reporting tools.

At its Actuate International User Conference on Tuesday in Los Angeles, San Francisco-based Actuate announced its membership in the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer as well as the proposal of the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project.

The BIRT Project aims to build an open-source reporting initiative that will produce a royalty-free report-development platform.

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Actuate officials said the BIRT Project would help to reduce technology acquisition costs, improve the quality of code by having large numbers of developers working on it, and lower TCO (total cost of ownership) by easing integration with other applications.

Click here to read about the features in the latest release of the Eclipse open-source development platform.

Company officials said most developers build reporting functionality into applications by hand-coding JSPs (JavaServer Pages), and an open-source initiative in this space would deliver free access to easy-to-use tools.

Actuate and Eclipse officials said the BIRT Project proposal will be available on the Eclipse Web site for review and comment over the next 30 days at www.eclipse.org.

"Actuate is honored to play a stewardship role within Eclipse, the most broadly adopted universal platform for tools integration," Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering at Actuate, said in a statement.

"We look forward to collaborating with the Eclipse community to create BIRT, a reporting and analysis tool to be developed following the open-source principles of transparency and meritocracy, where the best ideas and methods will be incorporated.

"It is our goal that this project will address the evolving needs of the open-source development community, and we welcome the communitys feedback and comment over the next 30 days and beyond," Coggins said.

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