When Eclipse 2022-03 came out this March, I was very happy that I could finally upgrade from the 2018 release. I could not believe it, I could be on a current release of Eclipse IDE. So, you might be asking yourself why were you stuck on that old release. Funny you should ask that and I will tell you the short version.
A couple of companies in the Eclipse world one called IBM and the other called Actuate Corporation were the large companies formally in charge of the development of the Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT). Somehow in the intervening years, Actuate got bought out by OpenText in 2015. OpenText pretty much stopped the development of the free version of BIRT and either transferred those Actuate employees or let them go. IBM, on the hand, just canceled its BIRT team around the same time even though many of their product relies on this technology for reporting.
This left BIRT with only a few volunteers to fix the bug and put out releases. Although they tried the last workable release was 4.8 in 2018. That is the release I have been using for about 4 plus years now. It worked but was based on Java 8. With each subsequent release of Eclipse which included new Java code, BIRT would not work with the other components that it relied on. Therefore you could not put the 4.8 packages into any new releases of Eclipse IDE.
As I have said many times before, Rocket Software Universe or Unidata has no built-in way of reporting except for the PRINT (page 295) statement using the PRINTER ON statement before that statement. So you have to write code to do logos, formating, paging, headings, and of course footing. With BIRT, however, you can print amazing reports. You can see one of my reports in the BIRT Gallery under the company name U2logic.
Sometime around the spring of 2021, a new group of volunteers started to work on bringing BIRT up to Java version 11 and hopefully releasing it to the public within a few months. It turned out that they were very optimistic about that goal. Nonetheless, just this month BIRT was released without a lot of fanfare. The wonderful engineers fixed numerous bugs and brought a release that works with the current version of Eclipse. Oh, by the way, I am using Java 17 with BIRT and it works wonderfully.
U2logic tool XLr8Reporter is now available for free with the purchase of any other product of XLr8. That means if you have a copy of our XLr8Editor or our other products you can use the BIRT designer interface to Universe and Unidata to create PDFs, XLSX, DOCX, and HTML reports for you or your shop.
