Eclipse Developers To Get Open-Source Reporting Tool

The new Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project ultimately will give developers an open-source alternative to built-in reporting services found in Microsoft Visual Studio.

"This is huge," said Scott Rosenbaum, vice president of Innovent Solutions, a Whittier, Calif.-based solution provider. "For years, Crystal [Reports] had this position of being embedded into Visual Studio, and a lot of report development got done in Crystal just because it was there. This gives legitimacy to open-source [business-reporting] initiatives."

Once complete, BIRT will provide developers with a free, open-source tool that can enable J2EE applications with built-in business-reporting capability, said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering for Actuate, San Francisco. Actuate's efforts are the result of its joining the Eclipse Foundation--the open-source tools group spun off from IBM earlier this year--as a strategic developer and board member.

BIRT will add business reporting to the Eclipse open-source IDE, a development framework that racks up about 10,000 downloads a day from the eclipse.org Web site, according to the Eclipse Foundation.

BIRT was published for community review Aug. 24 and is now in a 30-day review cycle, during which community members can provide feedback. By Sept. 24, the project should be accepted by Eclipse and a charter for the project announced.

The BIRT tool will have three levels of architecture. The project will build a report designer on top of the Eclipse IDE, which will be a drag-and-drop tool for creating and designing business reports, Coggins said. Developers would use the designer to define how a report will look and which data sources will feed information into the report.

The tool will then write out the second level of BIRT's architecture--designs with an open, XML format. These designs would then be consumed by the third architectural element, a reporting engine that renders the design by drawing data from the defined sources, Coggins said.

BIRT will allow developers using the Eclipse IDE to create Java applications, then switch to the BIRT design mode to use the reporting tool, without having to open a separate tool, he said. BIRT's reporting engine also can be embedded in Java applications, enabling users to create reports in the application of their choice.

Actuate executives said they chose to build BIRT from the ground up, rather than simply donating Actuate's code, so BIRT can incorporate as much feedback as possible on how the tool should be built.