From: Gregory Brown Date: 2006-05-25T01:07:51+09:00 Subject: Re: [ANN] Recipients of Google Summer of Code awards On 5/24/06, Victor Shepelev wrote: > From: dblack@rubypal.com [mailto:dblack@rubypal.com] On Behalf Of > dblack@wobblini.net > Sent: Wednesday, May 24, 2006 6:39 PM > > The students who have been awarded grants by Google, along with their > > project titles and names of their mentors, are: > > Are somewhere detailed description for all those projects? Some sound a bit > confusingly. Here is my full proposal, for those interested: anyone with further questions is invited to carry discussions over to the ruport mailing list: http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Proposal for the continued development of Ruby Reports. Project Background: The Ruby Reports library has been actively developed since July 2005. The goal is to build a high quality reporting engine for Ruby applications. It currently provides tools for data acquisition, database interacting, formatting, and parsing/munging. Though it has progressed over the last 10 months, work on it has been part time at best, thus making growth of the library rather slow. Developer Background: Gregory Brown has been active in the Ruby community since late 2004 and has worked on the HighLine library (http://highline.rubyforge.org) and the Gambit library (http://gambit.rubyforge.org) [ Made possible by ruby central ] Previous to working in Ruby, Gregory was working in Perl throughout hi highschool years. He is currently an O'ReillyNet Ruby blogger, a member of the Artima Ruby Code & Style Advisory Board, and an active member of the RubyTalk community. Gregory is a member of the NYC.rb and the new_haven.rb groups, the latter of which he helped establish. Goals: Though Ruby Reports (Ruport) is still in alpha status, it has acquired thousands of downloads and a surprising amount of developer feedback. One of the most common requests is integration with the Ruby on Rails framework, and with sufficient resources, this would be a top priority for Ruport. Another major priority for Ruby Reports is unifying the many excellent formatting toolsets available in the Ruby community into a single toolset. It is very common to require reports in a number of formats, be they html, pdf, plain text, csv, excel, or many others. Ruport will be expanded to make this easy for the developer to deal with. Work has already begun to integrate with RedCloth, PDF::Writer, and FasterCSV, with expansions of these formats and new format support on the horizon. Still, the most important part of Ruby Reports is data manipulation. The goal is to be able to compare data from an eclectic set of data sources with minimal headaches. Implementing data structures which will support things like calculated fields in tabular data, summary reports of datasets, combinations of data from different sources, and other advanced manipulations are a very high priority. Summary: Ruby Reports does not aim to re-invent the many wonderful libraries and frameworks which already exist in the Ruby community. It simply aims to bring the sort of integration techniques which caused Ruby on Rails to be such a success on the web development front to the reporting world. Through linking an easily extendable formatting toolset with strong data manipulation tools, and then providing integration with one of the most popular frameworks in the Ruby community, Ruport can become a very helpful piece of software for those who are building reporting applications, be they ad-hoc or robust.