Now, I emphasize the term
"environment" because, as some of us already know, Actuate doesn't just build
"products," it builds full-fledged platforms for report delivery, and BIRT is no
exception to this.
BIRT is what the Actuate Corporation sees as the future of its product line. While
some may consider it in its "infancy," BIRT is actually a fairly mature product
built on top of, and in conjunction with, the Eclipse Foundation and the Eclipse
Platform. In the two years since BIRT's introduction at the 2004 Actuate Users
Conference, BIRT has grown and matured to a full-fledged reporting platform,
which is something that the open-source community has been severely lacking. Its
announcement in 2004 really peaked my interest, as I was looking for a reporting
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platform to integrate into Sguil. Ever since my early introduction into the world
of MIS and BI, I had to struggle with the lack of a decent open-source reporting
product, and BIRT delivered on that and more.
At a high level, BIRT can be broken up into two main categories: The one most often
considered "BIRT," is the report development environment that is used to design and
develop reports. The graphical designer runs inside of Eclipse and leverages a highly
customized workspace. It uses a familiar graphical development paradigm, similar
to what Macromedia Dreamweaver or Nvu would use for designing web pages.
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