Friday, May 16th, 2008, 10:20:06 +0200, Gunnar Wagenknecht
A while back I got something to read - a book about BIRT (written by John Ward and published by Packt Publishing).
John Graham already posted his review about the book here and here. He summarized the content very well so I don’t need to go into the detail about the chapters anymore. Thanks John! 
The book is well structured and easy to follow. It starts with information about Eclipse and BIRT and explains what and how to download, install, etc. The style is clearly a tutorial style.
The examples used in this book are a mixture of small self-created examples and BIRT’s Classic Cars example. You will learn what pieces form a report, how to create reports and how to put the pieces together to get reports from a SQL database and also from XML or flat (CSV) files.
Although there is some comparison of BIRT to other reporting engines this book is better for you if you just want to learn and understand BIRT. It contains a chapter of how to deploy BIRT but the book is not of that much help if you are a developer that is looking at integrating BIRT into your own applications. The deployment just handles the BIRT Viewer that comes with BIRT.
The bottom line is: I can recommend this book if you want to learn, understand and use BIRT for creating reports. I also recommended it to my colleagues that wanted to learn BIRT.
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008, 08:28:05 +0200, Gunnar Wagenknecht
I’m hosting some projects over at Google Code. As part of the project setup you can select a license from a drop-down list. Apparently, the list is limited to eight licenses. The EPL is not it this list.
The Google Help Center says:
We’d like to see projects standardize on the most popular, time-tested ones. The selected licenses offer diversity to meet most developer needs.
The question to add EPL to that list came up a couple of times. In one of the discussions Greg Stein said:
[...] the Eclipse Public License has not really been adopted by the wider open source community. It is mostly being used just by one smallish corner: projects based on or around Eclipse.
That sucks, eh? But it gets worse.
I tried to make a reply using the web interface in that thread to make a comment about the license drop-down. For some reason it did not go to the list but directly to Greg. His response shocked me a little bit.
We only allow those eight licenses. If we find projects that are not licensed as described by the dropdown, then we will remove them.
Ok, back to SourceForge I guess. 
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008, 15:51:45 +0200, Gunnar Wagenknecht
Monday, April 21st, 2008, 11:36:49 +0200, Gunnar Wagenknecht
I’ll catch a train to Wiesbaden soon. Unfortunately, I can’t stay for the whole conferences but just tomorrow for our Server-Side Eclipse talks. If you weren’t able to join them at EclipseCon now is your chance agan.
Anyway, I wonder if there is a general place for Eclipse people (committers, contributors, fans) to meet? Something like the EclipseCon table topic but not just at lunch?
Sunday, March 23rd, 2008, 02:03:15 +0100, Gunnar Wagenknecht
After having experienced 20°C in California I stopped in Toronto on my way home to Germany. I’ll be here for a week to meet with a few people and to kick off a new reporting platform project involving some Eclipse technology.
We had about -6°C today and the usual wind made it feel colder. However, it’s always a good feeling to be back in this town. Especially for a short visit like this. The guy at the hotel already started to remember me.
