Building BIRT from source

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...