BIRT Project

Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools ( BIRT ) is an open source project that provides reporting and business intelligence capabilities for rich client and Web applications. It is especially suitable for applications that are written Java or JavaEE -based. BIRT is a top level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, a non-profit consortium of software companies and open source community.

The objectives of this project are to cover a wide range of reporting in typical applications of operationalem or enterprise reporting to multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP). Originally, the project has focused on giving application developers a powerful tool for the integration of reports in the hand. The current version has already achieved these initial goals and enables both the creation of drafts reports for an application as well as the creation and display of reports within the application.

History

The BIRT project was first proposed by Actuate Corporation and funded, as Actuate on 24 August 2004 joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer. The project was accepted on 6 October 2004 and a top - level project within the Eclipse community. For the BIRT community include the following contributors: IBM, InetSoft, and Innovent Solutions.

The initial code was designed and developed in the first half of 2004 by Actuate Corporation. As BIRT from the Eclipse Foundation has been accepted, Actuate these donated the work already done.

Architecture

BIRT has two main components: a graphical report editor within the Eclipse IDE to design BIRT reports, and a runtime component for the generation of reports that can be used in any Java environment. The BIRT project also contains a chart engine that is both integrated into the reports as Editor can also be used independently within an application.

Furthermore, the so-called BIRT RCP Designer, which is a separate program exists. This is no more installation of Eclipse IDE is necessary. The RCP Designer, however, is only available for Windows only and requires a local installation of JAVA ( version 1.5 ) operating systems.

BIRT reports designs are saved as XML files and can access numerous data sources, including JDO datastores JFire scripting objects, POJOs, SQL databases, web services and XML.

The component BIRT Viewer allows reports in a Web environment display, for example in the form of a JEE Web application with Apache Tomcat.