This morning I attended a roadshow by Actuate, the company that created the open source project BIRT. I recently introduced BIRT in one of my products, and I'm very happy with that decision.

The roadshow was in Plainsboro near Princeton and about 40 minutes away from our place. Most of the presentations during weren't very informative -- 'they had a low information density', as one of my friends would put it. I always wonder, am I the only one who feels that things could be told 5 times faster?

The part I liked were the short 3 minute demo's. While my product uses BIRT mainly to generate PDFs and other files, BIRT could be used for dashboard functionality as well. Apparently you can hook in your own Flash library to it, which is nice because we use FusionCharts already.