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