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Welcome to the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)
Project pages. The Eclipse BIRT Project is an open source Top Level Project
of eclipse.org. The Project Charter describes
the organization of the project, roles and responsibilities of the participants,
and top-level development process for the project. The Top Level Project
is overseen by a Project Management Committee (PMC).
The PMC organizes the Top-Level Project into Projects
coordinating identified resources of the Projects against a Development
Plan and working against a CVS repository.
The BIRT project addresses a wide range of reporting needs within a typical
Java application. Today, reporting capabilities in an application are often
implemented in an ad hoc fashion by the application developer, using technology
that is not ideally suited to the task, or through the development of a one-off
solution for that application. This is expensive and time-consuming, and provides
limited reporting capabilities for the end users of the application. BIRT aims to
address this problem by providing Eclipse-based open source and extensible tools
and frameworks that allow developers to easily incorporate reporting functionality
within their applications.
We encourage active participation in the BIRT project - read on and get
involved through the BIRT
newsgroup and the
Eclipse Development Process.
BIRT is a Top Level Project of Eclipse. The material here is for people
who want know more
about the BIRT project (instead of the software), or who wish to
contribute to BIRT.
The BIRT PMC meets weekly. All minutes are posted to the
birt-dev
mailing list. Past minutes can be found in the birt-dev mailing list
archive.
Projects within BIRT include the following.
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Eclipse Report Designer (ERD)
The Eclipse Report Designer is an Eclipse-based desktop authoring
environment for report development. Eclipse Report Designer enables application
and report developers to create simple and complex reports for use within their
organization. The tool caters to the broad range of report development skills
from the non-programmer report developer focused on report layout to the
application developer looking for sophisticated control over report creation. |
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Eclipse Report Engine (ERE)
The Report Engine allows Java application developers to quickly integrate
powerful report generation and viewing capabilities into their applications without
having to build the infrastructure from lower level Java components. The Report
Engine project enables reports to be generated using the XML report designs created
by the Eclipse Report Designer, Web Based Report Designer or any other tool. To
support this, the Report Engine provides two core services: generation and
presentation. The generation service within the Report Engine is responsible for
connecting to the specified data source(s), retrieving and processing the data
(sorting, grouping, aggregations, etc), creating the report layout and generating
the report document. The presentation service within the Report Engine provides a
rich set of viewing capabilities for report content. This includes the infrastructure
for viewing a document online; for printing a document; and for generating alternate
output documents such as PDF. |
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Eclipse Charting Engine (ECE)
The Chart Engine project provides a rich business chart generation
capability that can be used as a standalone charting component, as well
as providing the chart generation service within the Report Engine project.
Visual presentation of business data in the form of charts is a common, and key,
aspect of many reports and other forms of business intelligence. As such, a
robust charting capability is essential within the overall Business Intelligence
and Reporting Tools project. |
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Web Based Report Designer (WRD)
The Web Based Report Designer project delivers a fully customizable and
extensible, 100% HTML based tool for creating reports with basic layouts
and data manipulation. The tool will leverage components such as style sheets
and templates created using the Eclipse Report Designer. In addition, the tool
will provide an Eclipse-based customization facility for the user interface for
full branding and embedding within Java applications. The goal of this project is
to provide an accessible and easy-to-use report design environment to meet the
needs for ad hoc report creation by business users within any java application. |
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