I have recently heard some interesting podcasts from EclipseZone and BIRT has been mentioned a few times and sounds very powerful. However the documentation to get started is let’s say absent. The download page from BIRT points to some Eclipse distros…
I did however find somewhere on a mailing list how one can manually create jar files for embedded and similar use… This sounds really aweful. I also could not find any definitive guide on this and other similar use cases. Everything seems more or less focused on presenting a higher view such as the report tool and not programmability.
Any tips?
The BIRT Runtime Release available at the download page includes an example viewer application that can be run as a standalone web application. The best way to get started is probably to download and install it, look at the web application source and try modifying to your needs (the second link has links to some API docs, which aren’t very good either).
You will also need the report designer to create the reports that you’ll be running. It’s basically an Eclipse extension. You can either download a pre-configured Eclipse distribution or install with the Eclipse update manager.
Getting up to speed with BIRT will probably take some time. However, the BIRT Exchange has a good community site that you should get familiar with.