Frustrations with Eclipse 3.3 / BIRT 2.2 and open source support ...

Reporting is a complex issue. To make life easier we decide to support an open source reporting package BIRT from Eclipse. BIRT is definitely quite an impressive package with a great feature set and we are quite glad to have chosen it. The Eclipse project has a coordinated release. They recently released Eclipse 3.3 / BIRT 2.2. Since we had not yet shipped CiviCRM v1.8 we decided to ensure that our reports works with the latest version of Eclipse and in line with our project goals only support the latest version. Unfortunately we have hit quite a few road bumps and overall it has been quite frustrating, here are some of the highlights for those interested and attempting to do the same

• We tried to upgrade Eclipse/BIRT using the built in update manager. This did not work very well for either Dave or me (in addition to being quite slow). We abandoned this approach early on
• Downloaded Eclipse 3.3 and used the update manager to download BIRT. This was a faster smoother process. While we did get Eclipse to work, we could not get BIRT to work.
• After doing a fair amount of search and browsing the newsgroups, realized there is a bug in the update process and a required dependency is not being downloaded and hence we cannot run BIRT. Not sure if there is such a MAJOR bug, why the work-around is not listed at the TOP of the download page / install instructions. It probably takes someone all of 5 minutes to make the appropriate changes on the appropriate pages. For those interested, the bug is here.
• After crossing that hurdle, we found out we could create new reports quite easily, but could not read our previously created reports which we want to ship with 1.8
• BIRT uses a newsgroup (nntp) server for support. I use Thunderbird to read nntp newsgroups. Its quite painful to follow a thread and figure out if anyone replied to it etc on Thunderbird. Not sure why the eclipse / birt folks have not upgraded their support tools. The archive listings are slow, search is quite bad. Check out Nabble folks for good search and listings of mailing lists. Maybe move to a forum? How about IRC support while we are at it?
• We posted the issue and a reminder and have been going back and forth about this issue. We've reproduced it on 4 different clean installs on 2 different OS (Ubuntu and MacOSX). We've provided detailed dumps, but no resolution is in sight. The latest news is BIRT does not support MacOSX :( This will indeed be a bummer. What happened to cross platform java?

Hopefully we'll get this resolved soon. BIRT is definitely a great useful project and we are quite excited about the combination of CiviCRM and BIRT. The Actuate folks have helped us quite a bit and have responded to ALL posts. The above is meant to be some constructive criticism and hopefully highlight some issues that users face. On the flip side it helps us experience being on the other side of the support equation. We do try quite hard to respond to issues regarding CiviCRM quite rapidly and also provide support on IRC. At the same time I do suspect that we can and should improve our support process on a continuous basis.

Comments

I've been able to get ecliple/birt to work just fine on OS X. I've even updated to the latest BIRT, and it works too.

I've blogged earlier on how to install things. It did take me a while to get everything working. The biggest issue was making sure two key dependencies were installed - one being the java mysql plugin. Once that is in place, then all fit into place.

Let me suggest we meet on IRC so that we can compare notes.

Robert

and can create and run reports etc :) However we were not able to read the reports we created with v2.1 which was a bummer. We figured redoing the reports in 2.2 will be faster than trying to get that fixed. so our current focus is to get those reports working in 2.2

lobo

Just hit the same stupid issue you mentioned. The fix apparently is to open the file as text, copy all the XML, create a new birt 2.2 report file, past the XML into the new file. Talk about something screwy going on. I'm right now trying to test this on a linux box, but the stupid Eclipse site seems to be having issues recognizing that my Linux box is NOT a windows box, and so keeps trying to download the Windows release of Europa. Add to that, attempts to select the Linux download throw XML errors. *sigh* is eclipse/birt really cross platform, or are they just going to support windows and pretend to support other people, I wonder....

Add to this, an interesting bug a long while back dealing with trying to use POST variables to cache a username/password with the frameset viewer that is included with BIRT, and the support has been less than "stellar" on the actuate side. However, I've talked to a few developers directly and been most impressed with them :) SO, there ARE people there who know what they're doing, just seems we have to be patient and find the right people to talk to.