History

While xReporter is still very young and we prefer to talk about its future rather than its history, some of its background might be nice to know. This document has been written at the time of the second release (1.1) of xReporter in March 2003.

xReporter development started in the summer of 2002, for Schaubroeck, a long-standing customer of Outerthought. As part of its payroll management activities for Belgian city administrations, Schaubroeck manages a huge amount of databases, for which they require web-enabled database reporting. Having looked at a number of off-the-shelf products (and their costs), and given the huge database administration experience at Schaubroeck, they felt it as being appropriate to implement a custom solution. It was at that time Wim Van Acker, IT coordinator for the payroll administration business unit started envisioning a framework that would fulfill Schaubroeck's requirements, while making proper use of the internal knowledge about relational databases and XML. Outerthought had already presented the Apache Cocoon framework as being an ideal candidate for easy web-enablement of various information resources by the advanced use of streamlined XML and XSLT processing in a webserving environment.

A project was defined to implement a framework that facilitated the goals of Schaubroeck, and an agreement was reached to distribute the result of this project as an open-source solution. We still consider the fact that a moderately-sized company as Schaubroeck was willing to relinquish the rights to the codebase of xReporter as a great testimonial of the Cluetrain Manifesto: their relentless efforts to coordinate between Outerthought, a company of seasoned open source developers with an edge in Java and XML technology, and their own business requirements were nothing less than awesome. Without Schaubroeck, Outerthought would have never secured the funding for this major undertaking, and you would not be able to make use of the result of this project.

So here we are now, having released two subsequent releases of xReporter over a short period of time, and xReporter being in use at not only Schaubroeck, but also at some other interesting companies like Greenbrier & Russel and several others. The continued development of xReporter has been funded by Outerthought so far, though we hope that other companies join the project as users, developers or funders of this wonderful project. Due to our firm belief in open source as the ideal development methodology for infrastructure technology, there is no hidden agenda to create and release a commercial version of the xReporter framework, with only a restricted version being released under an open source license. While Outerthought is available for commercial implementation consulting and support, we hope that you will help us shaping the future of xReporter, by contributing patches and bringing on new ideas.