While the story I narrated in an earlier section of this chapter is good for telling my introduction to BIRT and demonstrates the need for open source reporting platforms, it is not the official origin of BIRT. For that, we need to turn to Actuate, and give a story that eventually intersects with my story.
Actuate has been a big player in the reporting arena for many years. Previously they specialized in the realm of enterprise reporting applications. However, seeing a ripe opportunity to address a growing market, the idea of an open source reporting platform was proposed.
Most applications have some sort of reporting requirement, and typically the success or failure of a product is hinged on how well that reporting works. The problem with this is that often times reporting in the real world is a challenging issue. Data is typically spread out and not formatted for reporting purposes. There are several different sources such as data warehouses, transactional systems providing website analysis, points of sale, data marts, and all sorts of different collections of data. To top it off, reporting requirements often change based on user requirements and market influences. Because of all this, creating flexible reports becomes a challenge.
Actuate decided to address these kinds of concerns, leveraging their years of experience to create a more modern framework for report development. Keeping in mind the issues that come across, the Actuate developers focused on addressing these issues in a manner that can assist report developers and reach a level of adoption of reports close to total. The Actuate philosophy has been stated on a number of occasions—creating products that allow its customers to get to "100% adoption" of reports. The success of reports can be measured by how well these reports are consumed, and often, if a report is successful, users will ask for more.
The decision was made to create an open source reporting platform. However, the open source market is a funny industry and so Actuate joined forces with an existing open source development community, the Eclipse Foundation, to leverage their existing framework as a base for its application.
BIRT has grown due to support and feedback from the community. The developers pay close attention to the groups out there and listen for comments about the strengths and shortcomings of BIRT in order to improve it. Unlike a lot of open source projects that have only part time developers, BIRT has a team of full time developers dedicated to improving the BIRT platform as a whole. BIRT even has a few "evangelists" dedicated to promoting the understanding and use of BIRT in the developer community.