The BIRT project addresses a wide range of reporting needs within a typical Java application. Today, reporting capabilities in an application are often implemented in an ad hoc fashion by the application developer, using technology that is not ideally suited to the task, or through the development of a one-off solution for that application. This is expensive and time-consuming, and provides limited reporting capabilities for the end users of the application. BIRT aims to address this problem by providing Eclipse-based open source and extensible tools and frameworks that allow developers to easily incorporate reporting functionality within their applications.