Eclipse to unveil updated BI tools Monday

23.01.2006
The Eclipse Foundation open-source community Monday will unveil the second version of its Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT), a move designed to expand the use of the tools from Java developers to a wider audience, including report developers.

BIRT 2.0, which will be available for download today, includes a reuse library with reporting and analysis components that can be shared among user groups, and enhancements to its reporting engine and report designer tool, said Mike Thoma, vice president of product marketing at San Francisco-based Actuate Corp. Actuate is a strategic partner with Eclipse for the business intelligence and reporting project.

While the first version of BIRT, released in June, was purely focused on Java developers, 2.0 adds features targeted at the 15 million report developers, Thoma said. In addition, because Zend Technologies Ltd. plans to add reporting to its PHP development tools using BIRT 2.0 this year, the 2.5 million PHP developers will also have access to the open-source tools.

"From a report developer's perspective, it is a drag-and-drop paradigm versus the coding approach in 1.0," Thoma said. "This will give people a very good alternative to commercial products in the report development space."

The second version of BIRT includes a new report component library that allows application developers to store report components for headers, charts or data transformation, according to Thoma. "A report developer could just drag components out of there and generate a report in a few minutes," he said.

This library also will allow BIRT to be more easily used by various communities of users, Thoma said.