1. 10 things to know about BIRT
The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project
1. It is an open source software project that provides reporting and business intelligence
capabilities for rich client and web applications, especially those based on Java and Java EE. BIRT
is a top-level software project within the Eclipse Foundation, an independent not-for-profit
consortium of software industry vendors and an open source community.
2. BIRT has two main components: a visual report designer within the Eclipse IDE 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.
3. 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, and Innovent Solutions.
4. Today: BIRT technology platform is one of the most widely adopted data visualization and
reporting technologies with over 12 million downloads and over 2.5M developers across 157
countries. BIRT also has a large, active and growing developer community representing all types
of organizations. Major technology companies such as IBM, Cisco, S1 and ABS Nautical Systems
have incorporated BIRT into their product lines.
5. Chart Engine: The chart engine provides a rich business chart generation capability to be used as
a standalone or invoked from the report engine. The chart engine supports creation of pie, bar,

2. line, scatter and stock charts, all of which can be rendered in the following graphic formats: 8-bit
images, 24-bit images, SWT graphics (GC), SWING graphics (Graphics2D) and SVG.
6. Report Design File: The report design file, as expressed by the BIRT Report Object Model
(ROM), is the key design “artifact” associated with a report. It contains the elements that make
up a report, including visual design components such as a table or an image, and other non-
visual items such as report parameters, formatting styles and data sources. The designer allows
the user to define these elements, the design file stores the elements in an XML format
adhering to the ROM, and the report engine interprets the elements to produce a report
document as output.
7. Design Engine API: The BIRT Design Engine API (DEAPI) enables the programmatic creation or
modification of report designs and also provides for interrogation of report elements and
semantic checking.
8. Internationalization: BIRT is Unicode enabled, and supports creation of reports in any locale,
with the exception of right-to-left languages.
9. Extensibility: BIRT is more than a reporting tool; it is an extensible reporting framework. As
such, it provides a number of extension points to support application-specific and general-
purpose modifications. These include: Custom scripting to incorporate complex and/or
application-specific business logic into report designs. • APIs that permit the introduction of new
visual components into reports and new attributes for existing components. • Pluggable
architecture for incorporating custom charts and new graphic formats into the charting engine.
• A flexible engine that provides the capability to create completely new report output formats
such as SVG, RTF and many more
10. Report Engine and the BIRT Viewer: The BIRT Report Engine API allows you to integrate the run-
time part of BIRT into your application as a set of POJOs (Plain Old Java Objects). The engine
enables you to discover the parameters defined for a report and get their default values,

3. incorporate included images or charts, retrieve needed data and transform it as necessary and,
finally, render the report in HTML or PDF. Report execution also encompasses execution of any
custom business logic associated with the report that is written in JavaScript or Java.
Learn more about BIRT
References:
file:///C:/Users/user/Downloads/eclipse-birt-datasheet-120727110444-phpapp02.pdf
http://www.eclipse.org/birt/about/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIRT_Project