Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools(BIRT)
BIRT is short for ‘Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools’. It is an open source Eclipse-based reporting system that integrates with your Web applications, mainly Java or J2EE, to produce significantly important reports. BIRT provides core reporting features such as report layout, data access and scripting.
BIRT is incredibly useful, mainly because of its two main components: a report designer based on the Eclipse platform and a runtime component that you can add to your own application server and it can produce reports from simple lists to charts, cross tab/matrix reports, text documents and compound reports that combine two or more of these types of data into a single report.
The reports can incorporate data from any source by using it’s Open Data Access (ODA) framework to access any kind of tabular data; reports can be generated from multiple data sources and Various data transformations are also supported. Some examples of this include summarization, sorting and calculation of percentages, as well as the type of sorting and grouping that is typically needed for business intelligence reporting.
