Actuate and Zend Collaborate to Deliver Reporting for PHP

December 6, 2006; 04:07 AM
Actuate Corporation, the world leader in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications that empower 100% of users to achieve breakthrough corporate performance, and Zend Technologies, the PHP company, today announced that they have teamed up to allow PHP developers to quickly add reporting capabilities to web applications using Actuate BIRT.

PHP, a recursive acronym for ‘PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor’, is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML. PHP allows web developers to create content that interacts with databases, and has quickly become one of the most popular languages for building dynamic web applications. Actuate BIRT, Actuate’s report development product based upon the Eclipse Foundation’s top-level open source project of the same name, is the perfect complement to PHP.

The collaboration between Zend and Actuate has resulted in new capabilities in the 3.0 version of the Zend Platform, which is available today for download as a pre-release version at www.zend.com. Zend Platform 3.0 allows PHP developers to quickly integrate reporting capabilities, including charting, to web applications by calling Actuate BIRT reports via the Zend Java Bridge. Web application developers are often faced with strong end-user demands for reports that integrate and summarize application data. This new functionality will provide an efficient alternative to hand coding reports from scratch using PHP, and will ensure that more PHP applications are up and running quickly with the reporting capabilities that they need. Developers who have built reports using Actuate BIRT will now be able to easily distribute those reports via PHP applications.

Functionality that is now available to PHP developers includes:

• Flexible report output formats that deliver single or multi-page PDF or HTML reports in several viewing and printed formats using parameters, multiple sections, grouping levels, charts, and more. Report content can also easily be exported to CSV format.
• Reports built on top of any data source that enable report developers to access and generate reports from SQL databases, text files, or XML.
• Easy-to-use visual design environment that enables developers to create and deploy reports in minutes via a simple, robust, wizard-driven interface.
• Powerful integrated charting that enables charting reports to be built easily in a variety of types which include Line, Bar, Pie, Meters, Area, Scatter and Stock. The charts can be output in different formats including Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

“Practically every web application requires reporting to meet user expectations for timely information,” said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering at Actuate Corporation. “By making report development easier within a PHP environment, the integration between the Zend platform and Actuate BIRT will ensure that a vast number of Web applications can take advantage of world-class reporting.”

“Corporate Web applications nearly always need to integrate data and logic from multiple, disparate resources,” says Andi Gutmans, co-founder and co-chief technology officer at Zend Technologies. “With the Zend Platform 3.0, we are delivering a new level of integration capabilities to PHP applications. The integration with the Actuate BIRT reporting engine is an exciting example of the value that these capabilities deliver to the PHP market.”

About Zend Technologies Inc.

Zend Technologies, Inc., the PHP company, is the leading provider of products and services for developing, deploying and managing business-critical PHP applications. PHP is used by more than twenty-two million Web sites and has quickly become the most popular language for building dynamic web applications. Deployed at more than 15,000 companies worldwide, the Zend family of products is a comprehensive platform for supporting the entire lifecycle of PHP applications. Zend Technologies, Inc. is headquartered in Cupertino, California. For more information, please visit www.zend.com, or call 1-408-253-8800.

About Actuate Corporation

Actuate Corporation is the world leader in Enterprise Reporting and Performance Management Applications that empower 100% of users to achieve breakthrough corporate performance. Actuate provides the most scalable, reliable, flexible and high-performing reporting capabilities for every application in the enterprise. Customers use Actuate to deliver information in context to users inside and outside the firewall as Performance Management and Customer Self-Service applications, managed spreadsheet applications and Java reporting applications.

Actuate has over 3,500 customers globally in a range of industries including banking, insurance, manufacturing, communications, and government. Founded in 1993, Actuate has headquarters in South San Francisco, Calif., with offices worldwide. Actuate is listed on the NASDAQ exchange under the symbol ACTU. For more information on Actuate, visit the company's Web site at www.actuate.com.