Actuate launches free BIRT viewer toolkit for open source developers and ISVs

LONDON, UK: Actuate Corp., The BIRT Company and the leader in personalised analytics and insights, today announced immediate availability of the new BIRT Viewer Toolkit - a free companion product to open source BIRT - designed for developers and ISVs.

The BIRT Viewer Toolkit (BVT) allows developers to speed integration of BIRT visualisations and reporting capabilities into their own applications. BVT is developed and supported by Actuate, and is a commercial-quality alternative to the sample viewer that is already included in the open source BIRT distribution.

Available for the first time to users of open source BIRT, the BIRT Viewer Toolkit includes Actuate's JavaScript integration API. Using JavaScript, BIRT content can now be seamlessly embedded into applications without having to write Java code.

BVT also offers other commercial-grade performance enhancements, including "demand paging" (the ability to jump to any page in a report) and "progressive viewing" (ability to view pages while BIRT completes rendering) providing much quicker response time for users viewing large reports. In addition, BVT significantly eases integration of any BIRT content into any custom application, including entire outputs, or portions of a report, without the need of iFrames.

BIRT developers can immediately deploy the BIRT Viewer Toolkit within a Java application server, and thereby offer end users a variety of features including the ability to view, save, link to, print and export reports in CSV, XML, HTML, AFP, PostScript and PDF; as well as in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. BVT also shows a report's built-in table of contents, offers parameter collection features including a date picker and multi-page navigation, and handles content hyperlinking.