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BIRT's Out and I Didn't Even Know It

I'm embarrassed to say that even though I recently posted about some open source BI projects, I missed the fact that version 1.0 of BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) was released this week.

The Eclipse-based project was initiated by Actuate, a BI vendor. Interestingly, BIRT is a new project and not a pre-existing product that was opened up. A lot of people seem to be wondering why Actuate would do this. It seems to me that they are going for the open source and Java developer audience, probably hoping to become a de-facto vendor in the Java BI development space. None of the other BI vendors are paying much attention, other than making Linux ports of their products.

Here's the BIRT description from the web site:

BIRT is an Eclipse-based open source reporting system for web applications, especially those based on Java and J2EE. BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component that you can add to your app server. BIRT also offers a charting engine that lets you add charts to your own application.

There are some articles and videos on the BIRT site if you want more information.

Note: I missed OpenRPT in my list of open source reporting tools a little while back. Here's the feature list they describe:

• Report Definitions are saved in the industry standard XML format
• Stand-alone or Embeddable WYSIWYG Report Designer
• Embeddable Report Renderer renders to local printers, including PDF and Postscript distillers
• Support for All/Even/Odd/First/Last Page Headers and Footers
• Support for Multiple Column Detail Sections
• Support for static and database sourced images
• Support for static and/or database sourced watermarks and page identifiers
• Support for multiple detail sections and optional, multiple group heads and footers for each detail section

I also came across another project: OpenReports, which is built on top of Jasper. Related to that is ObjectVisualizer which they describe as "an open source business intelligence tool that builds upon Object Persistence technology to provide easy to use query, reporting, and charting capabilities."

All this sounds interesting. I wish I had time to follow up on all these projects and do some in-depth testing. Working full time really gets in the way.

Posted by Mark Friday, June 10, 2005 11:27:00 PM | permalink |