5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFree

5 Reasons we chose BIRT instead of Jasper or JFreeReport

A year ago, I was looking for a way to integrate complex/graphical reporting into our software offerings. I was sure that the way is to find a open source project that has the right kind of license and right kind of technology. Regarding licensing, I wanted to make sure that we should be able to use the reporting engine/technology in our commercial softwares. I evaluated JasperReport, JFree Report (now part of Pentaho) and of course, BIRT. Here is what I liked in BIRT

1. BIRT is an Eclipse project: This made sure that the project is going to be live and evolving (as an open source project) in the times to come and will become more feature rich as the time passes. We were not afraid that someone is going to close the source directly or indirectly (by selling documentation at high prices) by creating a future version that will require commerical support to do anything but trivial.
2. BIRT uses standard technologies to the maximum level: It uses HTML for layout related things, JavaScript for scripting and CSS for styling! It naturally means we can leverage the existing knowledge that our developers have in creating the kind of reports our customer want. Faster and at lower costs.
3. BIRT offers very good GUI Designer: A graphical designer not just makes your life easier while developing the reports but you can also give it to your customers so that they can also do some small changes that they might need here or there in the report. Most important thing is that BIRT designer is group of plugIns for Eclipse IDE and hence quality of the report designer is excellent.
4. BIRT has a very nice Web Viewer: Yes it comes with nice pre-integrated ajax enabled web viewer that your can run from Tomcat (our favourite) or any other Application Server in less than few minutes.
5. BIRT has quality documentation, sample database, example reports: All this reduced the learning curve to a very affordable level.

If you are looking for a serious reporting solution (open source), I will recommend that you should consider evaluating BIRT. May be you can find the technology you are looking for.