Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) is an Eclipse Foundation open source project initiated and co-led by Actuate. It solves a problem that is part of nearly every application development lifecycle. Since the development of reports often takes a back seat to the development of an application's main functionality, both in terms of the technology used to create the reports and the time allocated to them, Java developers often hand-code reports in JSP near the end of the project. This limits the completeness and range of reports, and since it is the user-facing portion of the application including reporting that influences how an application is judged, this can hinder application adoption.
Once an application is deployed, users naturally request additions and modifications. A frequent enhancement request is for more and better reports. Additional output formats, layouts, groupings, sorting criteria, the ability to specify report parameters, calculate summary values on data, and include charts in reports are a few of the typical requests. Modifying hand-coded reports to meet these requests is very cumbersome. Ironically, the more successful the application, the more requests you get for modifications. BIRT was founded to help you avoid this dilemma.
BIRT is a visual report development environment that gives you everything you need to transform reporting from a necessary evil to the very reason users love your application. It is the only top-level Eclipse project focused on Business Intelligence. Version 1.0 of Eclipse BIRT was released in June 2005 and less than two years later BIRT had already been downloaded more than one million times. Major software vendors like IBM, BEA, Borland and Zend have incorporated BIRT into their product lines. BIRT has become a driving force in open source business intelligence and reporting.
- Eclipse BIRT Report Designer - An Eclipse perspective that is used to create BIRT report designs. These designs are stored in an open XML format. The Eclipse BIRT Report Designer comes as a set of plug-ins to enable the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer perspective within an existing Eclipse build (Eclipse BIRT Report Designer Framework), or as an all-in-one download that includes Eclipse (Eclipse BIRT Report Designer All-In-One).
- Eclipse BIRT Design Engine - This engine is responsible for creating and modifying report designs. The Eclipse BIRT Design Engine API (DE API) wraps the functionality of the design engine and is available for use within any Java/J2EE project. The Eclipse BIRT Report Designer uses this API internally to construct the XML designs.
- Eclipse BIRT Report Engine - The report engine uses the report design files to generate and render reports. Using the report engine API (RE API) the engine can be embedded within any Java/J2EE application. The Eclipse BIRT web viewer uses this API to execute and display reports.
- Eclipse BIRT charting engine - The charting engine is used to design and generate charts either standalone or embedded within BIRT reports. The charting engine API (CE API) allows Java/J2EE developers to add charting capabilities to their applications. The design and report engines make use of this API to deliver charts.
- Eclipse BIRT web viewer - The BIRT project provides a sample "viewer" that is used to preview reports within Eclipse. BIRT includes an Apache Tomcat server invoked each time you preview your report. In addition to being packaged as an Eclipse plug-in, the viewer is also available as a standalone J2EE application, which can be used in any JSP-compliant J2EE server. The viewer plug-in can also be embedded within a Rich Client Platform (RCP) application. Eclipse BIRT Release 2.2 provides web output as a single HTML document, paginated HTML, PDF, XLS, DOC, PPT, and Postscript. Additionally the viewer allows exporting of data to CSV, printing, and Table of Contents functionality.
Options for designing BIRT reports:
- Eclipse BIRT Report Designer All-In-One
- Eclipse BIRT Report Designer Framework (if you already have the Eclipse IDE)
- Actuate BIRT Report Designer Professional - same code base as the Eclipse BIRT Report Designer, but with indemnification and additional software to make installation and data integration easier
- Actuate BIRT Report Designer - similar to the Actuate BIRT Report Designer Professional, but without the developer tools. This version of the report designer is solely for developing BIRT reports and does not include the Eclipse IDE perspectives or project metaphors.
Options for deploying BIRT reports:
- Eclipse BIRT Runtime - Java API's and sample report viewer for integrating with your application
- Actuate iPortal for BIRT - Deployment kit consisting of pre-built web pages, JSP tags and URL interfaces
- Actuate iServer Express - Report server that deploys, manages, schedules, secures, runs and distributes BIRT reports
Options for enabling end user reporting with BIRT:
- Actuate BIRT Reports Interactive Viewer - end user report customization
- Actuate BusinessReport Studio - web-based ad-hoc report development
