Actuate pushes open-source data reporting

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I used Actuate in 2000 & 2001

It sucks. First off, they say (unless they fixed it) that their 'object oriented'. Well, they are if you're from Mars. Problem there is their hierarchy. It's not intuitive. Objects are children of illogical parents.

Second, maybe first, is terrible support. I sent them an e-mail with five dependent questions about one thing. They split it into 5 separate issues, handed it off to five different people, where English was a second language, and their solutions, when put together, didn't make sense. And took two weeks for all to arrive. This was on a premium support contract. I asked my superior what is going on, and he said they're more concerned with writing & selling new product than supporting the current one.

Third, it's slow. I was in an Oracle class with a project mgr from a Fortune 500 mega-corp who told me they ripped it out of a major project because it's too slow.

Fourth, while you can use SQL to create a cursor, there's no way to combine data in different cursors except by looping through both, i.e.
Do while !Eof()
Do while !Eof()
If cursor1.KeyField = cursor2.KeyField

Else
Loop
Endif
End Do
Loop

Fifth, no one uses it. In 2000, when there were IT jobs, I would get a job offer once a year from someone using it. Not more.

Sixth, while, by now, you can probably Google up some books on it, the last time I checked, you couldn't find many. But you could find classes for $5,000/pop.

If these things haven't changed, don't even bother with this thing. If you do, I hope your deadlines are far, far away.

Posted by: stugotz   Posted on: 08/25/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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