BIRT is an Eclipse-based open source reporting system for web applications, especially those based on Java and J2EE. BIRT has two main components: a report designer based on Eclipse, and a runtime component (Birt Viewer) that you can add to your app server. [ref: http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/intro/ ] Although BIRT is designed to be integrated into a J2EE web application, you can use it in any other development environment such as PHP. A brief description about how it works is given below. To design the reports, BIRT designer should be installed. There are few ways to do that, and those are described in - http://www.eclipse.org/birt/phoenix/build/#introduction . Designing reports is extremely easy, and tools are there to bind data with database tables/fields, build queries etc.. The next thing is, there should be a instance of BIRT report viewer installed in a web server like tomcat. How to install BIRT viewer in tomcat is described here - http://www.eclipse.org/birt/ph