News
Eclipse Brings Open Source to Business Intelligence Market
The Eclipse Foundation says the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)
project version 1.0 is now generally available.
The goal of BIRT is to allow Java developers to easily integrate business intelligence
and reporting capability into enterprise Java applications and commercial products.
BIRT was created as a top level Eclipse project in September 2004. The project
is part of the Eclipse strategy to provide open source tools and frameworks
that span the software development lifecycle.
"Eclipse's BIRT project exploits the convergence of analytics and operations
in application development, with its trend toward embedding BI functionality
within Java applications,” says Wayne Eckerson, director of research,
TDWI. “It's safe to say that a portion of Java developers and their organizations
will prefer a free, standards-based development tool to commercial-based options."
BIRT benefits Java developers by minimizing the time and effort associated
with hand coding core application functions such as reporting and analysis.
BIRT enables developers to create HTML and PDF reports quickly using JavaServer
Pages and Java.
BIRT 1.0 also supports internationalization and localization to save developers
time in customizing reports for languages and locales. For instance, a single
report can be created that displays strings in the end user's language. BIRT
also provides locale-aware data formatting, meaning that a date, currency or
numeric format can be applied to a report based on the end user's locale with
dynamic formatting compensating for the typical lengths of language descriptors
by automatically adjusting the size of report items to fit their content. This
avoids having to test a report with every possible translation. The Report designer
is available in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish
interfaces.