Development status of BIRT reporting Framework?

Question

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?

Answer 1

Metadata and information about the health of an Eclipse project can be found on projects.eclipse.org:

The Birt project is still alive, but not as active as before:

• there has been only one release per year since 2016 and
• in the last three months there have been more than 20 commits from 11 contributors.

Like all open source projects, the success of the project depends on participation. Therefore, I encourage everybody to report bugs and propose changes to Birt and other open source projects.

Update: Good news, Eclipse Birt has been rebooted. It is under active development again, there have been more than 100 commits in two and a half months and the release 4.9.0 is scheduled for March 16, 2022.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

The Eclipse BIRT project has been restarted recently, and we are working to prepare Eclipse BIRT 4.9 release.

Contributors are very welcome. Here is the brief instruction regarding steps how to join this effort: https://eclipse.github.io/birt-website/docs/community