From: Gregory Brown <gregory.t.brown@...>
Date: 2006-07-31T03:47:31+09:00
Subject: [SoC][ANN] Ruby Reports 0.4.19 Released

Hi folks, I'm happy to announce the 7th Summer of Code release of Ruport.

= Ruby Reports 0.4.19 : The "Robber Baron" Edition =

== What is Ruport? ==

Ruby Reports is a library and soon-to-be framework for doing business
reporting.  It provides a highly extensible formatting system, a
reporting friendly set of data structures, a very high level interface
to databases, and a common way of structuring and running your
reporting applications.  It aims to integrate a number of Ruby's best
tools so that you can easily take advantage of them.

== What is new in this release? ==

We now have rudimentary support for grouping.
Though it is just a start, we're already able to do some fun stuff.

For a somewhat visual example of this, see http://pastie.caboo.se/6632

I've also cleaned up a lot of messy code with the help of JEG2, and
fixed a few bugs in Data::Table that Dudley Flanders pointed out.

There is also the load_csv method in Report,  This allows you to
easily build a DataSet (our current default datastructure), a
Data::Table(the thing that I want to replace DataSet soon), or a plain
old Array.  This is mostly syntactic sugar, but it's pretty nice that
if you wanted to convert a CSV to a PDF in Ruport, it'd be as easy as
this:

 load_csv('data.csv').as(:pdf)

The next release will feature an invoice engine written by James
Healy, and some additional support for grouping, so please do let us
know what you think about the new features!

== Installation ==

Ruport is a gem, but if you need help with some of the dependencies
(such as DBI) or want to do a manual install, there are detailed
instructions available here: http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation

You can download it manually from Rubyforge here:
http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=856

Or grab it from SVN via:
svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/ruport/tags/rel_0_4_19

== Resources ==

[1] Wiki :  http://ruport.infogami.com/
[2] Atom: http://ruport.infogami.com/blog/atom.xml
[3] Mailing List: http://lists.stonecode.org/listinfo.cgi/ruport-stonecode.org

Right now, because documentation is either outdated or transient for a
lot of the core functionality of Ruport, we encourage you to use our
more 'interactive' resources.

Almost all Ruport related news eventually makes it onto the wiki[1],
so it may be a good place to start.  There is also an Atom Feed there
for Ruport's blog, which might be a good way of keeping up on the
latest news[2].  We encourage people to use the wiki actively, adding
tutorials, feature requests, reporting problems, commenting on
articles, etc.

There is also the mailing list[3] which has an archive that can help
you get up to speed on Ruport or solve a quick question.  This is a
very good place to start a discussion if you are working on project
you'd like to use Ruport in, are interested in contributing code, or
need to report a problem.

Finally, there is the IRC channel, which all three of Ruport's
developers hang out on often.  You can find this on freenode.
(#ruport)

There is a lot of cool new stuff in Ruport as a result of the Summer
of Code.  We even have some basic functionality for you rails folks
out there.  The problem is, we haven't been very good at ensuring
things get documented, especially since things are moving so fast.  So
please use these resources and let us know if you're lost, confused,
or want to help :)