Eclipse BIRT 3.7 released, now talks Hadoop

The latest release of Eclipse BIRT, Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools, has been made available by the Eclipse Foundation project as part of the Eclipse Indigo release train. The latest version includes a reworked POJO runtime which is easier to integrate into Java EE applications; previously, as BIRT was an Eclipse-based project it relied on OSGi to deploy the report designer and the runtime, but the latter was difficult to configure under Java EE because of OSGi's classpath handling.

Another major new feature is a driver which allows BIRT to create reports from Hive/Hadoop systems; using an extended JDBC driver, it is possible to access Hadoop data for reporting via Hive and the Hive Query Language. There are newly added OpenOffice emitters which export to ODT (Open Document Text), ODP (Open Document Presentation) and ODS (Open Document Spreadsheet) formats, which allow the designer or report engine to export to OpenOffice. There is also an extensible JDBC driver which can be configured in the designer, improved outline views and more emitter options.

Full details of the changes are available and the various components of BIRT can be downloaded from the project's Eclipse page.

(djwm)