Acknowledgments

John Arthorne and Chris Laffra observed, “It takes a village to write a book on Eclipse.” In the case of the BIRT books, it continues to take a virtual village in four countries to create these two books. Our contributors, reviewers, Addison-Wesley editorial, marketing, and production staff, printers, and proofreaders are collaborating by every electronic means currently available to produce the major revisions to these two books. In addition, we want to acknowledge the worldwide community of over one million Java programmers who have completed over ten million downloads of the multiple versions of the software. Their enthusiastic reception to the software creates an opportunity for us to write about it.

We want to thank Greg Doench, our acquisitions editor, who asked us to write a book about BIRT and has been supportive and enthusiastic about our success. Of course, we want to acknowledge the staff at Addison-Wesley who worked on the first and second editions and this third revision. In particular, we would like to acknowledge John Fuller, Michelle Housley, Anne Jones, Mary Kate Murray, Julie Nahil, Stephane Nakib, Elizabeth Ryan, Sandra Schroeder, Beth Wickenhiser, and Lara Wysong. We also want to thank Mike Milinkovich at the Eclipse Foundation and Mark Coggins at Actuate Corporation for providing the forewords for the books.

We particularly want to acknowledge the many, many managers, designers, and programmers too numerous to name who have worked diligently to produce, milestone by milestone, the significant upgrades to BIRT, giving us a reason for these two books. You know who you are and know how much we value your efforts. The following engineers have been of particular assistance to the authors: Linda Chan, Xiaoying Gu, Wenbin He, Petter Ivmark, Rima Kanguri, Nina Li, Wenfeng Li, Yu Li, Jianqiang Luo, Kai Shen, Aniruddha Shevade, Pierre Tessier, Yulin Wang, Mingxia Wu, Gary Xue, Jun Zhai, and Lin Zhu. We want to recognize the important contribution of David Michonneau in the area of charting. We wish to acknowledge Zhiqiang Qian who created a data bound report item extension used to develop the report item extension chapter. Yasuo Doshiro worked closely with the authors on “Developing a Fragment,” which provides suggestions for the practical application of BIRT technology to the challenges of translation and localization. Doshiro manages BIRT translation and develops and executes test plans. In addition, we want to acknowledge the support and significant contribution that was provided by Paul Rogers. Dan Melcher’s and Daniel O’Connell’s insights into the techniques for building reusable components that can be applied to building internationalized reports. Working examples are to be found at

http://reusablereporting.blogspot.com/

Creating this book would not have been possible without the constant support of the members of the Developer Communications team at Actuate Corporation. Many of them and their families sacrificed long personal hours to take on additional tasks so that members of the team of authors could create this material. In particular, we wish to express our appreciation to Terry Ryan for his work on the glossary that accompanies each of the books. In addition, Mary Adler, Minali Balaram, Frances Buran, Bruce Gardner, Shawn Giese, Mike Hovermale, Melia Kenny, James Monaghan, Lois Olson, James Turner, Jeff Wachhorst, C. J. Walter-Hague, and Forest White all contributed to the success of the books.

Actuate’s active student intern program under the Executive Sponsorship of Dan Gaudreau, Chief Financial Officer, made it possible for Maziar Jamalian and Rodd Naderzad to support the project in Developer Communications while actively engaged in pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in accounting, business, and information science at several different universities.