Introduction to eclipse Business Intelligence and reporting tools

Eclipse's Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool (BIRT) project is an open source project based on today's popular Eclipse IDE for building and deploying reports in Java or EE environments. The main downloads provided by this project include the following:

Birt Designer-Used to build reports.

Web Viewer-A Java EE example for deploying reports that includes a JSP tag library to reduce coupling with existing Web applications.

Birt Mapping package-supports building complex diagrams.

The Birt Project released its first major version in the summer of 2005 and has so far had more than 1 million downloads. Visit Http://www.eclipse.org/birt to learn more about the Birt project, which contains an introduction to the Birt Project, guidelines, downloads, and examples of use. We'll start with the introduction to the Birt designer as the beginning of this article, and the discussion of the Birt Viewer as the end of this article. Where the Birt Designer is used to design the report, and the Birt Viewer is used to deploy the design and produce the final report.

BIRT 2.2 Collage

Birt Designer

In the middle of Birt is a report designer consisting of a series of Eclipse plug-ins that form a design perspective that provides drag-and-drop capabilities to quickly design reports. Reports are created and stored in XML format.

Figure 1-eclipse BIRT Designer

This eclipse perspective contains a number of views that provide the ability to create reports. We'll explain that later.