Jason Weathersby is a Technical Evangelist for Mozilla, evangelizing Firefox OS, Developer Tools and all things for the Open Web. He is also a committer on the BIRT project at the Eclipse Foundation, and has co-authored several books and written many articles on BIRT integration. He is a proponent of HTML5, the Open Web and Open Source and is a regular contributor to the Mozilla Hacks blog. Jason has over 20 years experience in the software development field, ranging from real time process control to business intelligence software.
Just as Big Data sources and distributed systems are more prevalent today; presenting results in meaningful ways is more cumbersome. BIRT – a set of developer tools co-developed and sponsored by Actuate as a top-level project within the Eclipse Foundation – can ease visualization of results in a user friendly way. BIRT provides native support to access Hadoop through Hive queries as well as connectors to other Big Data sources such as Cassandra and MongoDB.
Using BIRT, developers can display their internal or external clients’ data in a stylized tabular or graphical nature, and customize it using the BIRT Designer environment. These reports can include dynamic drill through and interactivity, and can be exported to various formats including PDF, HTML, XLS, and ODT.
