Introduction and Goals

BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) has been around for quite a while.
Unfortuntly, in the last years development has slowed down quite dramatically. The last release 4.8 being from 2018. The Release Candidate 4.9 RC1 dating back to 2019 has never been released.

As this project relys on BIRT for reporting, this was enough reason for the author to look into it.

So i decided to get the source code from the promising Git repository build by Alexander Lehmann. It can be found here.

Below you find Alexander’s instructions on how to build BIRT with maven and import the project into Eclipse:
https://github.com/Flugtiger/birt/wiki

My Goals lay primarily in these areas:

  1. Update components BIRT relys on. Examples are Emitters, Grahpics Handling, Web-Server and so on.
  2. Make sure BIRT runs on newest JDK’s.
  3. Update build environment

You may wonder why added functionality is not a goal: well i am quite happy with the functions BIRT provides. But of course, this does not mean there is no work to do in this area.

In the following Blog’s, i will describe what measures i implemented to achieve the goals defined.