BIRT 2.6 Data Analysis and Reporting: Create, Design, Format, and Deploy Reports with the world's most popular Eclipse-based Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool

BIRT has a fairly small set of requirements to run, depending on one's needs.

Our first task should be to download BIRT. The typical location for everything BIRT related is the Eclipse website. Browsing to http://www.eclipse.org/birt will take us to the BIRT homepage. Here, we can get the latest news about BIRT, including status of upcoming releases, news on books, conferences, and access to the BIRT newsgroups where we can ask questions about BIRT. The newsgroups are an excellent resource for BIRT questions as they are frequented by the BIRT developers and BIRT Project Management Committee members. The following is a screenshot of the current BIRT project homepage:

The homepage is also where one can get the various BIRT distributions such as the All-In-One Eclipse package. This distribution contains a prepackaged version of Eclipse, which is configured with BIRT, the BIRT Standalone Report Designer, and contains information about retrieving and building BIRT from source.

At the time of this writing, 2.6 is the latest BIRT release, which is what...

The BIRT All-in-One package is the easiest BIRT package to install, so it will be the first one we will go for. The BIRT All-in-One package is a BIRT distribution that contains a full Eclipse installation preconfigured with BIRT. I usually use this as the base installation for Eclipse and add plugins accordingly. BIRT can have some tricky issues with configuration that I have come across in the past, and since then, I avoid these by installing the All-in-One package.

As with most BIRT installations, the All-in-One package is available from the Download BIRT link. This will typically take us to the current, stable release of BIRT. The developers seem to agree that the All-in-One package is the typical way to go as it is the first link on the page. The following is a screenshot of what the BIRT download page looks like:

Additionally, older and pre-released versions of BIRT are available from the "More Downloads" section of the BIRT's download page...

On Linux, installation is similar. The archive file containing the All-in-One package is a standard Linux tarball file. One recommendation for the Linux installers is to use Sun's Java instead of the GNU Java. The GNU Java is compliant to an older specification of Java than BIRT requires, and some features will not work correctly under Linux. Installing Sun Java under Linux can vary based on the distribution of Linux one uses and the distributor's views of the Sun license for Java. I have chronicled my experiences getting Sun Java to work under Ubuntu Linux (a free desktop-based distribution of Linux based on Debian) as well as CentOS (a free alternative to Red Hats Enterprise Linux) on my blog.

Also, based on the version of BIRT we run, we will need one of two different Java versions. For BIRT versions prior to 2.2, we will need...

This section covers the installation of BIRT using the Eclipse plugin manager. Suppose we already have an Eclipse instance that we use regularly. Because Eclipse can typically be a rather large package, installing a separate instance may not be feasible due to disk space constraints, I.T. policy, or some other limiting factor. In cases such as these, it is more appropriate to add to our existing Eclipse installation.

If one takes it upon himself/herself to install BIRT as a set of plugins, he/she must also install all the prerequisite plugins that the BIRT designer is built on top of. This is part of what makes the All-in-One installation method preferable to the manual installation of plugins. Another reason is that this is the avenue in which I have traditionally encountered the most installation problems such as dependency issues.

In order to proceed, we must first make sure the following dependency packages are installed with...

There are instances when it is desirable to build BIRT from its source distribution—if we are modifying BIRT, investigating a bug, or want to enhance the core of BIRT in some way. These are rare cases, but it is good to know how to build BIRT from source just in case. The following will walk you through building BIRT 2.5.2, but will work for 2.6 as well.

The first step is to retrieve the BIRT source code. The BIRT source is available from the BIRT Eclipse hompage. For 2.5.2, this is under http://download.eclipse.org/birt/downloads/build.php?build=R-R1-2_5_2-201002221500. The source package is located under the section labeled BIRT Source Code. Note the instructions saying there might be other libraries to install. We will probably need to download the Eclipse Data Tools project source code as well. We retrieve the ZIP file, but do not extract it. One will need a working copy of Eclipse in order to proceed. Here, we will be using an already extracted version of BIRT...

In this chapter, we looked at a number of different installation methods, including:

We have seen where to get BIRT, how to install it, and a list of the requirements needed to run BIRT. Now, before getting into the heart of BIRT report design, we should first get acquainted with the BIRT development environment.