This article is the second in a series on developing an application using Eclipse BIRT Engine APIs. It focuses on developing an application using the Eclipse BIRT Design Engine API. The last article focused on the Eclipse BIRT Report Engine API.

AjaxWord (www.ajaxword.com) is an open source Web-based word processor. It closely mimics Microsoft Word in both look-and-feel and functionality. The application was initially written between 1997 and 1999 using JavaScript/DHTML on the client side with ASP on the server side. It was released on the Web in 2000. In 2005, the application's server-side logic was migrated to Java and released as open source code.

The Eclipse platform is an open source, integrated system of application development tools that you implement and extend using a plug-in interface. The Eclipse Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) is a set of plug-in extensions that enable a developer to add reporting functionality to an application. BIRT provides a Report Engine API that a developer can use to create a customized report generator application. The org.eclipse.birt.repo rt.engine.api package contains a set of interfaces and implementation classes that supports integrating the runtime part of BIRT into an application.

These days, average home computer users spend more time surfing the Web and writing e-mail messages than doing just about anything else. Even if you're not much of a surfer, there are still numerous other applications that aren't really Internet applications per se but that still make use of the Internet in some way, such as gathering song and album information when you rip audio CDs to create MP3 files. Having a computer that isn't hooked up to the Internet is like buying a new Maserati and then refusing to take it out of the garage.

Troubleshooting a Linux process follows the same general methodology as that used with traditional UNIX systems. In both systems, for process hangs, we identify the system resources being used by the process and attempt to identify the cause for the process to stop responding. With application core dumps, we must identify the signal for which the process terminated and proceed with acquiring a stack trace to identify system calls made by the process at the time it died. There exists neither a 'golden' troubleshooting path nor a set of instructions that can be applied for all cases. Some conditions are much easier to solve than others, but with a good understanding of the fundamentals, a solution is not far from reach.