BIRT to deliver open source reporting SW

BANGALORE: Business intelligence software vendor Actuate has joined hands with the Eclipse Foundation to build an open-source business reporting tool on Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE). Said an online report.

The project known as Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) has been published for community review and is currently under a 30-day review cycle. Developers will kick-start work on the reporting tool as soon as the project gets acceptance from Eclipse.

The tool will provide developers with a free, open-source tool that can enable J2EE applications with built-in business-reporting capability.

There are three levels of architecture in the project. At the first level is a report designer on top of the Eclipse IDE, which will be a drag-and-drop tool for creating and designing business reports. Using this tool developers can define the layout of the report and the data sources involved. At the second level of the designer code can be written in the XML format, and at the third level is a reporting engine that takes the design and renders it by drawing data from the defined sources.

Since the tool will be inbuilt with Eclipse IDE developers can switch easily between writing Java code and the reporting tool.

Actuate also plans to offer training support for BIRT and offer a commercial product to provide embedded business reporting for Java applications.