Chapter 2. Installing BIRT

I'm sure that after discussing the features of BIRT, you're excited to jump right in. Well, you're in luck, as I am equally excited to show how these features will help you. BIRT is a powerful application to meet one's reporting needs, but the first step is to get BIRT and install it. This can be a bit daunting, as BIRT comes in so many different flavors.

In this chapter, we will discuss the various methods of downloading BIRT and installing it. Specifically, we will cover the following:

• Installing the standalone BIRT report designer

• Installing the BIRT Eclipse Plugin through the Eclipse update manager

• Installing the BIRT Eclipse Plugin Manually

• Building BIRT from source

BIRT prerequisites

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

Software requirements

There are no specific operating system requirements to run BIRT as it is a Java application and it should run on any platform that Java will run on. For the BIRT Report Designer, any platform...