| [birt-dev] Eclipse BIRT PMC Meeting Minutes - Monday, August 8, 2005 |
Meeting
BIRT PMC, 10am Pacific, Monday, August 8, 2005
Attendees
Paul Clenahan - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Scott Rosenbaum - BIRT PMC - Innovent Solutions (www.innoventsolutions.com)
Jason Weathersby - BIRT PMC - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Absent due to travel schedule: Wenfeng Li - BIRT PMC Lead - Actuate Corporation (www.actuate.com)
Minutes
BIRT 1.0.1 Update
The PMC is pleased to say that the availability of BIRT 1.0.1 was announced last Friday Aug 5th. BIRT 1.0.1 is now available for download from the http://download.eclipse.org/birt/downloads page.
The PMC encourages the community to provide feedback via the newsgroup and Bugzilla.
BIRT 2.0 Planning
Candidate projects for future releases, including BIRT 2.0, are listed in the BIRT Wiki area (see http://www.eclipse.org/birt/wiki/index.php?n=BPS.BPS). The community is encouraged to review this content and provide feedback.
BIRT 2.0 Planning: Free Format Reports
BIRT supports a rich set of report layouts via the "Grid", "Table" and "List" elements in the palette. This web-centric approach is different from many report development tools, is quite intuitive (especially for developers who are familiar with web authoring tools), and allows report developers to create a wide variety of reports. However, it does not support the ability to create free-format reports (where any control can be placed at an arbitrary x-y coordinate on the page). While this is likely to be a capability that BIRT ultimately supports, it is not currently a candidate for the 2.0 release.
The PMC is looking for further feedback in this area from the community. Specifically, is free-format report support needed, and, if so, is it higher in priority than existing projects that are being proposed? Paul C will create a Bugzilla entry for this (if it is not already there) and solicit feedback via the Newsgroup.
BIRT 1.0.1 Release Notes and "New and Noteworthy"
We are in the processing of creating the BIRT 1.0.1 "Release Notes" and "New and Noteworthy" documents and getting these posted on the BIRT web pages. Anticipate that this will be completed this week or early next week.
We also plan on creating a documentation page for alternative access to these documents and other BIRT documentation (which is currently available in the product downloads).
BIRT Web Site Updates
Jason W is currently reviewing the BIRT web pages. He is identifying pages that need to be updated as well as where new content is needed. We expect to see updates over the coming weeks.
BIRT at EclipseCon 2006
The PMC wants to ensure that there are adequate sessions available at EclipseCon 2006 for the BIRT community. Right now, we are thinking of proposing 3 sessions from the project team. Exact session titles TBD, but along the lines of:
BIRT: The Eclipse Reporting Framework - a "Long Talk" (1 hour) that introduces BIRT to the novice user and explains how to use it.
Leveraging BIRT Reporting in Your Application - a "Long Talk" (1 hour) that talks about how to integrate BIRT into your application.
In Depth: Extending and Using the BIRT Reporting and Charting Framework - a "Tutorial" (4 hour) session that covers BIRT in detail, including developing extensions for BIRT. Rough outline would have 1 hour on embedding and using the Reporting Engine, 2 hours on extending BIRT using ODA, visual and emitter extension points. And 1 hour on charting.
Jason W is going to draft presentation proposals for the EclipseCon committee. When these are available, we will also ask the BIRT community to comment on these using the EclipseCon proposal review process.
BIRT Evangelism/Education in the Broader Community
We have a number of different events in the pipeline for BIRT in the broader community:
BIRT is being discussed as part of an Actuate talk at the Bay Area BEA User Group meeting on August 8 (http://dev2dev.bea.com/pub/e/719)
BIRT is part of the MySQL booth at LinuxWorld in San Francisco on August 8-11 (http://www.linuxworldexpo.com/live/12/events/12SFO05A)
Two session on BIRT at EclipseWorld in New York on August 29-31 (http://www.eclipseworld.net/)