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Development status of BIRT reporting Framework?

Very little has changed in a while for BIRT. Since the project seems still heavily used, it would be interesting to know if there are future plans and if so, what is entailed in those plans. Subsequently, based on the development status: Is BIRT still a safe platform to base development on or is it expected to just be conserved in the current state such that occuring bugs probably won't get fixed?

Solution

  • We decided to use BIRT instead of Jasper 8 years ago. We are still using 4.2.1 for development and 4.3.0 for production runtime.

    I reported several bugs since then and only very few of them got fixed.

    Furthermore, I developed some patches to enhance the word emitter output - with no reaction from any one at all.

    I also developed a patch to allow kind of a vertical tab (to place something at a fix y position on the page (but not in the page footer). With my previous experience of the community, I did not publish that one.

    I can say that while the source code is quite easy to read, it is nevertheless almost impossible to understand what is actually going on, because the functions are extremely deeply nested.

    My conclusion with 8 years experience of using BIRT for production:

    PROS:

    • BIRT is very powerful and flexible, you can achieve some very cool results.
    • The quality of the resulting PDFs.
    • There are only very few things I miss and cannot work around.
    • The runtime engine is very stable and fast enough, very few problems.
    • The community is helpful.

    CONS:

    From an open-source perspective, it is one of the weakest projects I know of.

    • New versions tend to introduce more bugs than they fix.
    • Bugs, ideas and patches from the community seem to be ignored most of the time.
    • Lack of internal code quality and documentation.

    Update Dec 2021:

    BIRT is back again!

    The open source project is quite busy (see answer by Alexander Fedorov) and every help is welcome.

    It looks like there will be a new release soon.

    Until then, building BIRT yourself (with Eclipse 2021-09 and Java 11) has become quite easy thanks to the common effort of the community.

    Update Jan 2023:

    The BIRT project is quite active again. BIRT works with Java 17. ATM what's still missing is availability of BIRT in Maven.