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".

---------------
References:
[1]. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project
[2]. http://www.eclipse.org/birt/about/
[3]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39W8-9tUiOU

Comments

Only allow input number value with autoNumeric.js

autoNumeric is a jQuery plugin that automatically formats currency and numbers as you type on form inputs. I used autoNumeric 1.9.21 for demo code. 1. Dowload autoNumeric.js file from https://github.com/BobKnothe/autoNumeric 2. Import to project <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.11.0/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="js/autoNumeric.js"></script> 3. Define a function to use it <script type="text/javascript"> /* only number is accepted */ function txtNumberOnly_Mask() { var inputOrgNumber = $("#numberTxt"); inputOrgNumber.each(function() { $(this).autoNumeric({ aSep : '', aDec: '.', vMin : '0.00' }); }); } </script> 4. Call the function by event <form> <input type="text" value="" id="numberTxt"/>(only number) </form> <script ty...

The Evolution of Team Collaboration

I n my point of view, if a team has a good collaboration, team members will achieve the following: To be more effective To make work more enjoyable I have been working for a company for nearly four years as an software developer. Working on various projects from maintaining existing systems to developing a substantial product resulted in me moving to new teams three times. Actually, my most stable team lasted only around three years. Every time I've moved to a new team, I have a chance to work with new members and a new team culture again. Indeed, I realize that there is a process of developing the team collaboration which gets better time by time. I think it is an evolution ! Phase 1: Poorly collaborate For example, that is when the team members have the following issues: Only work on his/her area of expertise Don't communicate to others Be not confident to take on new challages Don't listen to other members. Subsequently, the team ha...

What the heck is Meteor DDP?

I was using Meteor for my messenger project. I was so curious about the real time connection. I wanted to know how exactly this mechanism works. In this post, I will go through the DDP Specification, an overview of WebSocket, and a simple demo about how to subscribe a publication of Rocket.Chat (containing a DDP server) from an external webpage. At a glance, I knew that Meteor invented a protocol called DDP which uses for handling real time connection. So then, what is DDP? "DDP (Distributed Data Protocol) is the stateful WebSocket protocol that Meteor uses to communicate between the client and the server." [1] All right! Why does DDP matter? "DDP is a standard way to solve the biggest problem facing client-side JavaScript developers: querying a server-side database, sending the results down to the client, and then pushing changes to the client whenever anything changes in the database" . [2] In order to understand deeply the protocol, I decided ...

Why Business Rules Engine Matter

"A good DSL minimizes the 'communication gap' between a domain concept and the code that implements it" - Robert C. Martin A Use Case It looks like adopting a new technology is always driven by a business need. The organizations, such as banks, have their own business processes (such as data gathering and document management). These processes are different from others but usually the differences are not big. How do we build a product which can be reused the similar features but still be adaptable with the specific requirements of each bank? Then, the answer is we should have a library/framework. There is an idea that we can implement this library/framework by using a business rules engine. Which has the following benefits: Be able to modify implementation of business domain at runtime (such as XML, CSV) S ource code is more readable for both developers and domain experts. Therefore, source code can be consider it as a document Since Business Rules Engine...

Building Axon.ivy Projects on Bitbucket Pipelines

Read me if you don't know what Axon.ivy (Ivy) is. Motivation - Ivy projects are designed to be built on a continuous integration (CI) server like Jenkins - Today, Bitbucket supports for CI with Bitbucket Pipelines - We're using Bitbucket. Then, why not? It must be very cool and convenient for us if we can centralize our CI and VCS (version control system) tools in one place. Here is an approach We have to use a maven plugin called project-build-plugin to build ivy projects. This plugin requires an instance of Ivy engine during building time. Bitbucket Pipelines allows us to specify our own docker image as a build environment. What we need to do is to prepare our docker image with needed stuffs such as JDK, Maven, Ivy engine, etc. Step 1. Prepare Docker images For testing purpose, I already created two docker images: Maven and Axon.ivy engine. They are now available on Docker Hub This image for Maven using Oracle JDK 8 This image for Axon.iv...

vhandit

Search This Blog