Callisto Project to launch 10 releases

What may go unnoticed in next week’s Callisto release, a flurry of open source releases from the Eclipse Foundation, is BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools), a project some consider the future direction of all Eclipse open source endeavors.

Callisto will include 10 projects, ranging from the group’s popular IDE to the Eclipse Data Tools Project.

The BIRT project will be part of that general release. But the open source development platform for designing BI reporting tools stands out because of the close synergy between its developer, Actuate Software, and the Eclipse Foundation.

As Eclipse project leader for BIRT, Actuate figures prominently in setting the technology’s direction. That’s an advantage when it comes to ensuring BIRT is compatible with the company’s commercial products.

BIRT includes a report designer, an XML design format, and a rendering engine. Actuate will include BIRT technology in Actuate 9, to be released this week. On top of that, Actuate will add an AJAX-powered portal, Web-based report development tool, and interactive content viewing to basic BIRT functionality.

“We bring the principles of open source, the participation and iterative development environment, and modularity into our commercial product,” said Nobby Akiha, vice president of marketing at Actuate.

According to Keith Gile, principle analyst at Forrester Research, the company’s use of open source to enhance its own closed-source wares is fair play.

“If all a developer wants is BIRT, then that is available for download with no strings attached,” Gile says.

The value to the enterprise is in the creation of a platform onto which any vendor can build commercial applications, said Ian Skerritt, Eclipse’s director of marketing.

In fact, Eclipse encourages companies to take open source technology from the foundation and commercialize it. That gives companies a greater choice of solutions rather than being locked in to a single-vendor platform and applications, Skerritt said.