Chapter 10. Deployment

So far in this book, we have developed a bunch of reports. While some of these reports were intended to be used for our own purposes, some reports may be intended for use by other people. How do we get these reports to the users who need to run them? That's the question that deployment seeks to answer.

With BIRT, deployment is a large topic. Some people consider the BIRT Viewer that comes with the BIRT Runtime as the deployment endpoint. On the contrary, BIRT deployment is a much larger product due to the fact that the BIRT Report Engine API is available to embed into Java applications.

In this chapter, we are going to look at two of the different deployment options available. We will look at the BIRT Viewer for J2EE that comes with the BIRT Runtime and that is embedded into the BIRT Eclipse IDE. We are also going to look at a basic Java application that implements the Report Engine API to run reports. We are also going to look at the command line tools that come with...