Friday, October 30, 2015

Reporting solutions

Hi,

today I had a look on reporting software... of course I did not consider the hardcore solutions for big corporations like Cognos, tibco, microStrategy,...

After some research I decided to pick the following solutions to dig deeper:
- SAP: Crystal Reports
- Microsoft: SSRS
- Eclipse: BIRT
- tibco: JasperReports
- jsreport
- sealreport
- Pentaho

The free solutions looked mature enough to kick the commercial solutions out of my evaluation.
jsreport seems to have currently fewer features than the others (even if the concept looks quite straight-forward for web-solutions), so I kicked it.
seal-reports is open source, but the full power of the solution will not be unleashed until buying a license (when I understood it right), so I kicked it.

- Eclipse: BIRT
- tibco: JasperReports
- Pentaho

These are exactly the solutions as described in http://opensource.com/business/14/6/three-open-source-business-tools ... Because I want to stay focused on reporting and not on BI I removed Pentaho from the list ( http://www.pentaho.com/ seemed to stress the data integration and the setup of a cube) and choose BIRT because of a lot of opinions on the web like  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2513534/birt-vs-jasper-reports .

A good comment of the opensource.com-link above introduced the page www.reportserver.net which seems to be a good extension to the BIRT technology.

must criterias for the reporting solution:
- db interface
- pdf output
- web output
- IDE for power-users
- active development / community
- command line support

kind regards,
Daniel

Thursday, October 29, 2015

bootstrap editors

Hi,

after a small break I am back reincarnated as a web developer.

Today I played around with bootstrap trying to change the style of my web-page.

Following resources helped me much
- http://getbootstrap.com/
http://www.bootply.com/
- http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/
http://glyphicons.com/

but it didn't feel right to work online (and to collaborate without possibly wanting it).

I found other resources to consider
http://www.layoutit.com/
http://brix.io/

... again web, but there are still the stand-alone, cloud-less, good-old tools like:

commercial desktop products:
http://pinegrow.com/

free desktop products:
http://pingendo.com/


What I did not found are true alternatives to bootstrap itself and in fact I don't even need any. Bootstrap is a really good designed, good working framework which does create good looking pages.

kind regards,
Daniel