If you're not familiar with our project at all, you might want to quickly glance over the Overview and Examples pages before continuing on.
Even if you've used ruport before, you might have noticed our goals have evolved over time, but we've finally found an objective we think clearly expresses what we're trying to do:
The Ruby Reports project is dedicated to making your business reporting life suck less (through ruby).
Right now the project consists of three initiatives:
As of 2007.05.15, we can say with some confidence that the first of our three projects has become mature enough to be quite useful. Ruport is already being used for real work, and though it is a simple system, it has been quite handy in practice.
If the last time you looked at Ruport was version 0.8 or earlier, you're in for a surprise! Our formatting system has been enhanced in a number of ways to make it quite extensible. We also now have support for row based rendering, data grouping (and rendering), and other things that have been on the to do list for so long.
If you've been following the project tightly, and have used the latest release candidates, you won't notice a whole drove of new features, because we've mostly been stabilizing in preparation for 1.0. You should notice an increased stability, level of documentation, and general polish on the code, though. We managed to sneak a few changes in since RC3 though. :)
All in all, we've closed every outstanding feature request ticket. So that means you're going to have to let us know if we missed stuff!
Absolutely not! However, there are some interesting changes to the project organization.
Michael Milner will take Gregory Brown's place as lead developer effective immediately. Gregory will be maintaining the stable release branch of ruport, and will also be heading the development of ruport-util. Mike will be overseeing the development for Ruport 1.1+, as well as maintaining the acts_as_reportable rails plugin.
On the surface, not much will change. A new benevolent dictator will just create an opportunity for new ideas and project growth. After almost two years, it's time for Gregory to stop obsessing over Ruport anyhow.
We plan to play it by ear and see what people think of Ruport 1.0 before we worry about new developments in the core library. However, we're planning on doing a lot to augment the auxiliary libs.
Gregory is currently working on a pair of camping apps that make use of Ruport heavily for commercial work. We plan to open-source these soon enough, which should provide a decent working example of a non-trivial Ruport based system.
Michael still has some tricks up his sleeve for acts_as_reportable, and will be continuing to work on the plugin as new ideas arise.
We'll also be working on getting any of the tools that we've developed that might be generally useful into ruport-util.
As you can see, there is no shortage of things to be done! We'll also be working on getting you higher quality documentation and tutorials as soon as we can
If you're interested in working with Ruport, you should have a look at some of the Resources we have available to users and contributors. Our best resource is certainly our mailing list, so please stop by and let us know what you think!