Alex,
I can't point you to any documentation, but I can give you
a bit of history from my fuzzy memories. First off, the goal
of the runtime was to have a way to distribute BIRT free from
the UI. The project wanted people to be able to include BIRT
in their applications, but we did not want them to have to
include all the UI components. So the Runtime is just those
components required to Design (design engine API), Run, and
Render reports with out any of the UI components present. When
this was first created, it was tightly bundled with the whole
eclipse platform, and required the engine to first start up
the platform in order for the Report Engine to work.
Once the project got going, there was a lot of demand from
our users to create something that was not dependent on the
Platform. "We just want to drop the jars in the lib directory
and run reports" was a common request.
So we modified the runtime to not be dependent on the
platform, which is now the modern runtime. But what about
users that have implemented BIRT using the 'old' way of doing
things with all the platform code, plugins directory, etc. We
didn't want to force them to change their code, or we wanted
to let them just drop in their plugins. We also had customers
that were deploying their reports within an RCP client. So
that is what led to the Runtime-OSGI. It is simply a backwards
compatible version of the Runtime.
Do we need to keep it? I don't know, my guess is no, but I
would leave that up to the community.
Scott