Integrating and Extending BIRT (The Eclipse Series)

A new edition of this title is available, ISBN-10: 0321580303 ISBN-13: 9780321580306

 

 

The second of a two-book series about business intelligence and reporting technology, Integrating and Extending BIRT introduces programmers to BIRT architecture and the reporting framework. Built on the Eclipse platform, this exciting technology makes it possible for programmers to build and deploy customized reports using scripting and BIRT APIs. In addition, programmers can extend the BIRT framework by building new plug-ins using the Eclipse Plug-in Development Environment.

This book describes the key components of BIRT architecture, applications, and engines, including installing, deploying, and troubleshooting the Reporting and Charting engines in an Enterprise Java application-server environment.For developers who wish to incorporate custom business logic in their reports or access data from Java objects, the book describes BIRT's extensive scripting capabilities in JavaScript and Java. For developers who want to extend the BIRT framework, the book describes the key extension points to use in creating customized report items, rendering extensions for generating output other than HTML or PDF, and Open Data Access (ODA) drivers for new data sources. The book provides extensive examples of how to build plug-ins to extend the features of the BIRT framework.

Topics discussed include

Installing and deploying BIRT Deploying a BIRT report to an application server Understanding BIRT architecture Scripting in a BIRT report design Integrating BIRT functionality in applications Working with the BIRT extension framework

User review
BIRT Report Designer
It is a very useful book for anybody starting to use BIRT. However, some sections are slightly out of date vs. the new versions (2.2.2) of BIRT in 2007.

The basic concepts in this book are still very useful, otherwise it is hard to find online information explained in such a systematic way and in such details.

User review
Explains org.eclipse.birt for Java customisation
This book is an impressive extension on `BIRT: A Field Guide to Reporting`. The latter described BIRT to a newcomer, showing how to use its features. With a minimal discussion of scripting for customisation. While the scripting certainly involved programming, it was rather minimal, and most of the text showed a declarative layout approach to using BIRT.

The Integrating book is the sequel. Strictly a programmer's book. It assumes you've read the earlier book. But now you need to take the customising [much] further. So here the text shows how to program in Java, not just JavaScript. Essentially, the bulk of the book explains the package org.eclipse.birt, which is freely available and has been built out with many classes. The problem to a programmer is the sheer multitude of those classes. An embarrassment of riches which the book tackles.

Some classes relate to customising the UI. There is a charting API built on top of Java Swing. So you can key off your pre-existing Swing expertise. Swing is pretty easy to learn, and the BIRT graphics classes seem to continue this property.

The only possible problem might be if you prefer SWT widgets for the better native look and feel. But the BIRT contributors correctly decided to support the most popular widget set, which is Swing.

Other BIRT classes relate to getting data at the back end, from various possible sources.