Each engine has its particular advantages and drawbacks, as detailed in the following sections. One common drawback is that these reports run on Java™ only. You must create custom report programs for COBOL.
BIRT is an Eclipse-based reporting system that allows for sophisticated output in PDF or HTML format, including graphics, tables, graphs, and charts.
You can design a report in the Report Design perspective of your Workbench and then write EGL code that drives report creation. EGL support is available in JSF handlers and in programs generated for Java.
The EGL text report engine draws on EGL parts such as the generic Handler, Delegate, and ExternalType. . You can use the Handler part to respond to a limited list of specific events during the output of report data. Your data source can be anything you can read from in EGL. It should take far less time to create a simple report design with this engine than with BIRT.
As the name implies, the only available output format for the EGL text report engine is a plain text file (though you may also direct output to stdout).