BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), is an Eclipse-based open source reporting system developed for Web applications. The special feature is that it is based on Java and JavaEE. BIRT has two main components: an Eclipse-based report designer, and a runtime component that is deployed to an application server.
A BIRT report contains four parts: data, data transformation, business logic, and presentation.
Data - Databases, Web Services, Java Objects, these can all serve as BIRT report sources. Version 1.0.1 provides JDBC support and also supports the use of encoding to fetch data elsewhere. BIRT's ODA (Open Data Access) framework allows anyone to build new UIs and run-time support for any type of tabular data. In the future, a single report can contain data from any number of data sources.
Data Transformation - Reports adapt to user needs by classifying, counting, filtering, and grouping data. Of course, databases can implement these functions, and BIRT has to deal with "simple" data sources when it encounters ordinary files and Java objects. BIRT allows complex operations such as aggregate groupings, percentages of overall totals, and more.
Business Logic - Real-world data rarely provides you with the ideal well-structured reports. Many reports require specific logic to transform raw data into useful information for the user. If the logic is only used for this report, you can use BIRT's JavaScript support. If your program already contains this logic, you can call existing Java code.
Representation - Once the data is ready, you can choose from a wide range of representations. Tables, charts, text, etc. A single dataset can be represented in multiple ways, and a single report can represent multiple datasets.