A Community Site For Report Developer

We launched a new community site http://www.birt-exchange.com/ for report developers today. It provides typical "community" features such as forums and wiki. One unique feature on the site is a DevX listing, where anyone can post code example, report design tips, tutorial, product downloads, consulting service, or any cool things that one wants to share. DevX items has rating, review comments, visit count that will help me find out which of them are really good to pick up. I can search for items by keywords using the filtering tool.

Today, contents on the site mostly are about Eclipse BIRT, and Actuate iServer and iPortal products. But the site is built in a way that it can be used to serve other technology communities too, what we need to do is set up different interests areas and forums for that community. Well, the first step is to find out what works on birt-exchange.com and add features to make it an useful place for report developers.

The Eclipse Release Train

The Eclipse planning council has set a goal of releasing several of its top level projects at the same time in its next major release. While there are a lot of benefits of doing so, we know that it is not easy to coordinate software development within one team, let alone among several teams from different projects with developers around the world. It will be a true test on the maturity of Eclipse development process, PMCs, project leaders, and developers. The BIRT project has opted to get on the Eclipse release train. The plan is to synch up with the rest of the projects in a milestone build before the end of this year. This exercise will help us work out issues and give us confident that we will be able to release together in the summer of 2006. Release often and test often is the key to get the train moving.