Playing with BIRT

Some time ago I started to experiment with BIRT, the eclipse based Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool. Recently I’ve been taking another look at it. I found some examples of how to set it up to talk SOAP and after a little bit of experimentation got it to work. Great!.

Then I thought, what about viewing the reports in a web browser. A bit more digging and I found some info on using the BIRT Report Viewer (in the run time download) with Apache tomcat. So off I toddled to grab tomcat and the viewer,  and after a few false starts (never done this before) I managed to get it all running and my report visible in my web browser.

So now I am wondering if I can format the reports nicely to view on an iPhone (should just be some CSS) but also, could I embed some javascript like jQuery or iUI into the reports so that they behave like regular web apps but give me the ability to do the actual design using a decent tool.

Mmmmm. Brain cells are waking up….

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