== Ruby Reports 1.0, Release Candidate 1 (0.10.0) == After 2.5 months of extremely overactive development since our last major stable release, clandestine behaviours, and other things that go bump in the night, a rough cut of what will become Ruport 1.0 is finally ready. We can really use your feedback, so if you've been waiting to try out Ruport, now would be a good time to start. And since it's now on RubyForge, you don't even need to trust our sketchy gem-server to try it out! == What is Ruport? == Ruby Reports (Ruport) is an extensible reporting system. It aims to keep things as simple as possible while still providing the core toolset you'll need for most reporting tasks. == What can Ruport do for me? == (If you're already familiar with Ruport, you might want to skip this section) We provide a solid data model that can be easily hooked up to a number of sources, including CSV files, ActiveRecord models, and raw SQL connections through DBI. We also provide an insanely easy to extend formatting system which provides a consistent interface as well as a set of helper functions for a number of output types (HTML,PDF,CSV, and plain text). On top of that, Ruport offers a bunch of little tools to tie things together and help you be more productively lazy. This includes a high level report interface, as well as a code generator (rope) that will help lay out a project for you and do other cool things like generate boilerplate code and tests when needed. We're not aiming to be a comprehensive reporting solution, our primary goal is to make reporting applications easier to build in Ruby, not build them for you. That having been said, you can find things like basic support for graphing and invoices in our ruport-util package. This is likely going to take a little while to build up and stabilize, but it should be a good way to add higher level functionality to your Ruport projects as time goes on. == Major Changes since 0.8 == * Real support for Grouping operations and rendering * Row based rendering support * A whole slew of PDF helper functions * Built in support for ActiveRecord via acts_as_reportable (now in Ruport) * Majorly revamped formatting / rendering system * API impovements throughout * All subsystems are more extensible now * rope now has a ton of new features * Plenty of things I've already forgotten By Example: http://tinyurl.com/33m88x New, cooler examples will be out soon. == Get it == Ruport and it's dependencies: gem install ruport -y The Ruport Utilities package(optional) gem install ruport-util -y == Get Help == Mailing List: http://list.rubyreports.org Please sign up even if you want to not receive any mails, so we know who is interested in Ruport out there. All questions are welcome on the list, both support related and development. IRC: #ruport on Freenode API Documentation: http://api.rubyreports.org/ We've fallen behind a bit on docs, sadly. However, we did try to remove all deprecated documentation. If you spot defects in the docs, or are having trouble understanding them, please file bug reports Trac Wiki: Our wiki is at: http://code.rubyreports.org Keep an eye on it for helpful resources in the near future. == Get Involved == We'd really appreciate feedback on this release so we can make tweaks before 1.0. This is an early candidate, so we may end up changing some things before Ruport is production ready. You can file change requests and bug reports at: http://code.rubyreports.org Use the account ruport / blinky to file tickets, and tie them to the milestone "1.0 RC1 Change Requests" == That's all for now == We'll collect change requests for a little while, clean some stuff up, add some more docs, and have a new release candidate out soon. Looking forward to hearing what folks think!