If you build your own editor in the most cases you have to provide the capability to print its content. In addition you probably also have to print different business-logic that is not presented by an editor or viewpart. SWT gives you the possibility to generate printing jobs, what is a bit complex. With the Open-Source API PaperClips there is a possibility to generate data that can be sent to a printer in a very easy way. In addition it provides cool UI-Elments, e.g. a Print Preview. In this article is explained how to register a Print-Action as GlobalAction Handler, with formatting the data you want to print and a Print-Preview.

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Eclipse BIRT is a reporting API and designer for “rapid reporting creation” . In nearly every application you have the requirement to generate different reports in different output formats. A colleague was faced with that requirement on a J2EE Application and we decided to try BIRT to see if it’s already in a state where you can use it on “real” projects. In the following I want to share my experience with BIRT in that project.

The requirement was the analysis of a questionnaire with a chart. A common use-case. The team already had experiences with Jasper Reports and iText.

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