Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) is a reporting technology that delivers formatted business data to printers and screens. You can use BIRT to produce sophisticated output in PDF or HTML format, including graphics, tables, charts, and graphs. You can sort and otherwise manipulate data from databases, variables, or Web services. For additional details, see http://www.eclipse.org/birt.
To create a report, an EGL program invokes the BIRT report engine. The engine can then invoke EGL functions that are used as event handlers, which are logical units that respond to a particular kind of runtime event. For example, the engine might invoke one event handler at the start of the report, one event handler at the start of a predefined report group (such as the sales data for a single type of product), and another event handler at the end of the report. In another example, an event handler might change the color of report text when the report receives a value from the EGL program, a database, or a file.
BIRT reports are available for logic that runs under Java™ Platform, Standard Edition (JSE) or Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (JEE).
When you need neither graphical content nor an HTML- or PDF-formatted deliverable, you can use EGL text reporting to create reports that deliver the output of business processes. The benefit of EGL text reporting is speed at both development and run time. Several of the details of BIRT reporting are true for text reporting: text reports can include values that are submitted by the EGL program that drives the report-creation process, EGL functions can act as event handlers, and EGL text reporting is available for logic that runs under JSE or JEE.
An EGL print form is a set of character-based fields that a program writes periodically to a printer, either directly or by way of a file. Print forms are available for COBOL programs, JSE applications, and JEE application clients.
The material in this topic is largely from Enterprise Web 2.0 with EGL (MC Press, 2009; http://www.mc-store.com/5107.html).