Eclipse BIRT and JasperReports

Neither Eclipse BIRT or Jasper seems to support the whole functionality of BI. Their main focus is "reporting", which is a core part of BI. Both of them are written in Java.

Eclipse BIRT has two components: A report designer and a report engine. the report designer interacts with user to generate an XML report design using its report design engine; while report engine reads the data and the XML report design to generate reports in different types of format (HTML, PDF, Excel, Word, and etc). The following chart from the eclipse BIRT website illustrates well.




Let's come to Jasper. I use Jasper because there are two different things associated with Jasper: JasperReports and Jaspersoft. JasperReports is the open source java reporting library while Jaspersoft is a collection of software including JasperReports. Apparently, Jaspersoft is heading the BI direction straightforward as it includes more enterprise BI functions such as ETL, analysis, dashboard and etc. It does not seem Jaspersoft is open source, so we here only talk about JasperReports.

JasperReports claims to be "the world's most popular open source reporting engine". From it's website, it says:

It is entirely written in Java and it is able to use data coming from any kind of data source and produce pixel-perfect documents that can be viewed, printed or exported in a variety of document formats including HTML, PDF, Excel, OpenOffice and Word.

Similar to Eclipse BIRT, JasperReports has a JasperReports Engine that reads data from a wide range of data sources (DB, XML, CSV and etc) and generates reports in different formats. This process is controlled via some configuration files or run time parameters, so it can be customized to an extend. The following is the chart from the JasperReports website that shows the process.


It seems the bare JasperReports does not have a component that allow users to design reports （there's an additional one called iReport for report design), which Eclipse BIRT has. Apparently, an additional report designer make the software more user friendly. However, in another sense, the lightweight of JasperReports makes it easier to be embedded/integrated in a bigger software system.

Stack Overflow has a question asking about the difference of the two tools: BIRT vs JasperReports and someone gives a link that compares BIRT, JasperReports and even Pentaho in terms of their reporting features.