Review By: Tilmann Bruckhaus, PhD
07/09/2010

"Integrating and Extending BIRT" by Jason Weathersby et al. discusses BIRT, a powerful reporting platform that provides end-to-end reporting solutions. With BIRT, which is tightly integrated into Eclipse frameworks and platforms, report designers can create and deploy report and integrate reporting capabilities into other enterprise applications. This book is the second of a two part series on BIRT, and the first book in the series is "BIRT A Field Guide to Reporting."

The authors present "Integrating and Extending BIRT" in a clear and systematic style. Although the book does not contain a chapter dedicated to testing BIRT applications, testing BIRT installations, plug-ins, and extensions are discussed throughout the book. Specifically, developers can use Java and JavaScript for scripting in reporting applications for event handling or to create scripted data sources and scripted data sets. Developers can also use BIRT APIs to integrate BIRT functionality into applications. Similarly, developers can use the BIRT extension framework to create report item extensions, report rendering applications, or Object Data Access (ODA) extensions. QA and test professionals will find this information useful to devise test strategies for BIRT applications.

The book is organized into five parts and nineteen chapters, which facilitates quick access to those parts the reader is most interested in. A multitude of tables, code snippets, diagrams, and screen shots visualize and organize the content in an easily accessible manner.