News
Eclipse shines light on BI and reporting tools
- By ADT Staff
- January 24, 2006
On Monday, the Eclipse Foundation released version 2.0 of its Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project. Several companies, including Actuate, IBM, Pentaho, Scapa Technologies and Zend have announced support for BIRT 2.0. According to Eclipse, the improvements in functionality and usability in 2.0 will speed its adoption by Java developers and expand BIRT's usage into a broader community of report developers.
BIRT 2.0 adds large persistent reports with page-on-demand for end users. It also extends Web-style drag-and-drop report development with new analytical report types, expanded charting facilities, and debugging facilities for Java as well as JavaScript scripting, Eclipse says in a prepared statement.
"In the open-source world, many would contend that the community behind a given project is at least as important as, if not more so, than the project's source code," says Stephen O'Grady, VP of RedMonk. "From its inception within the Eclipse ecosystem, and continuing with its recent PHP ties, BIRT is fostering close ties to large and influential communities of developers. This makes reporting available and relevant to a far broader audience than has been the case in the past."
A detailed summary of what's new in BIRT 2.0 is available here.