Eclipse Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT)
BIRT is a very cool set of Eclipse plug-ins for designing and deploying tabular reports to the web. I’ve been following BIRT since even before there was anything to download from the Eclipse site, when BIRT was just a proposal, and it has come a long way.
If you need to generate and deploy reports of data from a database or even from XML, you ought to try BIRT. Downloading and install from the Eclipse site can be a pain, especially if you’re new to Eclipse and its many dependencies on other more or less obscure projects.
Actuate has a nice one-button download and install link option on their site. If you’re not interested in source code, and really, just want to try BIRT and not deal with Eclipse stuff, I’d recommend you try it from the free downloads section. Sure, they still want to know a few things about you, but nothing major. You don’t even need to give them your real email address if you don’t want to.
Rather than put together yet another tutorial on how to get started with BIRT (and because I’m lazy like that), I’m going to link to the tutorials on the Eclipse site. They’re well done and easy to follow. See here.