Actuate Corporation, the world leader in enterprise reporting applications, and the Eclipse Foundation, announced that all of the modules currently under development for the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools Project (BIRT) are now available. In addition, a build infrastructure has been established to provide regular builds of BIRT to the Eclipse open source community to allow for regular community feedback.

The elements of BIRT now available include, report object model (ROM) which is a schema for describing the elements that make up the design of a BIRT report; Eclipse report designer, an Eclipse-based desktop authoring environment that generates reports based on the ROM; Eclipse report engine, which enables reports to be generated using the ROM designs created by the Designer; and a Eclipse charting engine which provides a rich business chart generation capability within BIRT and can also be used as a standalone charting component.

BIRT will benefit developers and, in particular, the Eclipse Java developer, by expanding the availability of business intelligence and reporting to a wider audience, and allow faster incorporation of reporting within Java applications. Developers require tools such as BIRT that are simple to use and widely applicable in order to minimize the development costs associated with building core application functions such as reporting and analysis.

In addition, BIRT will promote interoperability with commercial reporting offerings by offering ROM, a report definition language that allows for the easy transfer of report definitions, making it easier for developers to migrate report designs amongst tools.

"The Eclipse community forges the path for technical excellence, innovation and extensibility within the Java world," said Mike Milinkovich, executive director of Eclipse Foundation. "Availability of BIRT marks another step towards accelerating the development of Java applications that include business intelligence and reporting capabilities."

"The planning process for BIRT has been agile enough to embrace the feedback from our user community and has remained focused on our vision to provide the first open source technology to address the development needs that arise from building reporting and business intelligence application components," said Mark Coggins, senior vice president of engineering for Actuate and a board member of Eclipse. "We once again welcome feedback on BIRT to ensure that the BIRT Project Management Committee has remained true to its vision."