The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project is an

open source software Open-source software (OSS) is Software, computer software that is released under a Open-source license, license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and Software distribution, distribute the software an ...

project that provides reporting and

business intelligence Business intelligence (BI) consists of strategies, methodologies, and technologies used by enterprises for data analysis and management of business information. Common functions of BI technologies include Financial reporting, reporting, online an ...

capabilities for

rich client In computer networking, a rich client (also called a heavy, fat or thick client) is a computer (a " client" in client–server network architecture) that typically provides rich functionality independent of the central server. This kind of comput ...

and

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

s, especially those based on

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

and

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web serv ...

. BIRT is a top-level software project within the

Eclipse Foundation The Eclipse Foundation AISBL is an independent, Europe-based not-for-profit organization that acts as a steward of the Eclipse open source software development community, with legal jurisdiction in the European Union. It is an organization supp ...

, an independent

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consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community. The project's stated goals are to address a wide range of reporting needs within a typical application, ranging from operational or enterprise reporting to multi-dimensional online analytical processing (

OLAP In computing, online analytical processing (OLAP) (), is an approach to quickly answer multi-dimensional analytical (MDA) queries. The term ''OLAP'' was created as a slight modification of the traditional database term online transaction processi ...

). Initially, the project has focused on and delivered capabilities that allow application developers to easily design and integrate reports into applications. The project is supported by an active community of users at BIRT Developer Center and developers at the Eclipse.org BIRT Project page. BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the

Eclipse IDE Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. It had been the most popular IDE for Java development until 20 ...

for creating BIRT Reports, and a runtime component for generating reports that can be deployed to any Java environment. The BIRT project also includes a charting engine that is both fully integrated into the report designer and can be used standalone to integrate charts into an application. BIRT Report designs are persisted as

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...

and can access a number of different data sources including JDO datastores, JFire Scripting Objects, POJOs,

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

databases In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and ana ...

Web Services A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

and XML.

History

The BIRT project was first proposed and sponsored by Actuate Corporation when Actuate joined the Eclipse Foundation as a Strategic Developer on August 24, 2004. The project was subsequently approved and became a top-level project within the Eclipse community on October 6, 2004. The project contributor community includes

IBM International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...

, and Innovent Solutions. In 2007 IBM's Tivoli Division adopted BIRT as the infrastructure for its Tivoli Common Reporting (TCR) product. TCR produces historical reports on Tivoli-managed IT resources and processes. The initial project code base was designed and developed by Actuate beginning in early 2004 and donated to the Eclipse Foundation when the project was approved.

Versions

References

Bibliography

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External links

Eclipse BIRT project home page
{{Eclipse plugins 2005 software Business intelligence software Free reporting software Free software programmed in Java (programming language) Eclipse (software) Eclipse technology Eclipse software