Project

Section Contents

Project Organization

Welcome to the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) Project pages. The Eclipse BIRT Project is an open source Top Level Project of the Eclipse Foundation. 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.

About the BIRT Project

The BIRT project addresses a wide range of reporting needs within a typical Java application. 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 addresses 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 forum, and the Eclipse Development Process.

Getting Help Using BIRT

The rest of these pages provide information for people who want to know more about the BIRT project, how it runs and how to contribute. For help using BIRT, see the Documentation section or the design and deployment guides on the the BIRT Developer Center.

Project Resources

The material here is for people who want know more about the BIRT project or who wish to contribute to BIRT.

Project Processes

The BIRT Project leverages and follows the processes used by the Eclipse Platform projects and others within the Eclipse Foundation. Below are links to help answer frequently asked questions in this area.

PMC Minutes

The BIRT PMC meets weekly. All minutes are posted to the BIRT Wiki.

Projects

Projects within BIRT include the following:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.