Understanding the BIRT Architecture : About the BIRT engines and services
 
About the BIRT engines and services
An engine is a set of Java APIs that provide basic functionality in a specific domain. BIRT contains several engines, for example, the report engine, design engine, and chart engine. These engines provide several different types of services. A service is a set of Java classes that provide functionality using the API provided from different engines. For example, the generation services use the design engine API and report engine API to generate reports and produce report documents respectively.