Business Objects to Join Eclipse Foundation 78
daria42 writes "Business intelligence specialist Business Objects is the latest software maker to join the Eclipse Foundation, and says it will move several products onto the open source platform -- but it's not yet saying which. 'We won't fight it, we'll embrace it,' said one of the company's executives in Sydney last week, talking about the open source software model. 'One of the reasons we've chosen to go with the Eclipse platform, rather than any of the other open source types,' she said, 'is that [Eclipse] actually has a model where vendors can sell value-added products into it, but still provide the service components.'"
Re:Repeat after me... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Crystal Reports for Java? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm surprised that it took so long (Score:5, Informative)
Hopefully, this shift will pan out as a move to better integration of Crystal Reports with web services without having to shell out for Crystal Enterprise. Up through the present, most of Crystal's eggs have been placed in the COM basket so that reporting is best automated through Windows programming. This is great in that you can automatically connect to a database, run a report, export the output and email the export in a few dozen lines of VBScript. But if Business Objects is moving to web services, it will offer a great deal more flexibility as automation will no longer be restricted to Windows.
Re:Crystal Reports for Java? (Score:4, Informative)
> Crystal Reports (Formerly of Seagate, Crystal Decision, and lord knows what other companies) has long been considered the best of these options. In
> otherwords, they were/are the best piece of crap solution available. Microsoft (insert booing and hissing here) has finally decided to create
> their own reporting solution (SQL Reporting) which from what I've heard is a significant improvement over CR XI (yes, 11 versions and there are
> still limitations on Cut and Paste)
A few points:
1. business objects has a meta-driven reporting platform, and is one of the top three vendors in the OLAP marketplace.
2. it didn't get there by buying crystal reports - crystal reports is the lowest-end product in their suite
3. the microsoft reporting solution is merely another low-end reporting solution, competes with Crystal Reports, but not the rest of the Business Object suite.
4. the business objects BI (business intelligence) platform is very powerful, and is a reasonable tool to use if you are supporting or performing a vast amount of reporting (lets say you're a financial analyst for a large company). otherwise it's often overkill. Note: there are no cheap/free equivilents to this product - the other commercial ones are sold by Cognos and Microstrategy. These are products that are often sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
5. describing custom reporting solutions as piles of crap is about as reasonable as describing custom web sites as piles of crap. Some are better than others. The hard thing for many programmers to get their head around is that when you need to analyze a business process in order to get a good idea of what's going on:
a. you really don't want to have to marshall a few million java objects
b. you really don't want to have key-value pair tables in your model
c. you really don't want to think of data as merely persisted objects
d. you really don't want to have to use an oo database
e. you are much more likely to drive mysql into the ground due to its lack of parallelism
f. if you run the reports on a typical transactional data model you'll do millions of joins and the sql will suck
g. back to f, and the performance will suck, and your server will die
g. back to f, and the functionality of your analysis will suck due to lack of historical data and lack of integrated data from other systems
Reporting is a discipline with its own best practices, patterns and anti-patterns. Unfortunately, most non-reporting people still think that painting reports via Crystal Reports is a neat idea. Which it hasn't been since around 1995.