BIRT Makes Open-Source Reporting Premiere

The Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project version 1.0 became generally available this week, following a months-long preview mode for the effort to create an open source reporting tool for Java developers.

Open source community The Eclipse Foundation initiated BIRT in order to let Java developers integrate reporting into their own apps and to facilitate the production of third-party commercial software that makes use of open source reporting.

Eclipse kicked off a preview version of the business intelligence tool in February. Since then, hundreds of community members have given their feedback on the tool's first version. BIRT has been downloaded 9,000 times since February, said Eclipse VP of marketing Ian Skerret.

BIRT is designed to let Java developers cut the time and effort they spend on hand-coding core functions, especially reporting and analysis. BIRT enables HTML and PDF report-production in a matter of hours.

Business intelligence software maker Actuate has led the BIRT project as a strategic member of Eclipse. As one of 13 such members, Actuate has a seat on the Eclipse Board. Eclipse has a total of about 100 members, most of which are engaged in the development of non-BI applications.

A handful of other vendor entrants have begun efforts to produce open-source reporting tools, including startups JasperSoft and Pentaho. The firms hope to emulate the success of open-source database maker MySQL by offering tools at a lower cost than established makers of packaged BI software.