Happy (Belated) Birthday Ruport

I need to wish the Ruport project a belated “happy birthday”. I turns out that they turned two yesterday, Gregory Brown made the announcement on the ruby-talk list:

Just a quick bit of trivia:

Two years ago today, Ruport 0.1.0 was released on RubyForge.

He also mentioned that they’d be making the 41st public release of Ruport to celebrate. This isn’t just a ‘birthday release’ without any added value though. It’s a full on 1.2 release loaded with goodies for the discriminating Ruport user, and a few incompatibilities with the 1.0 version. Some of the major enhancements include:

• Table#sort_rows_by now allows nil objects and allows ascending / descending order
• Table constructors now accept :filters and :transforms Procs
• AAR’s report_table() now accept :filters and :transforms Procs
• Grouping constructor accepts :order, and new Grouping#sort_grouping_by method
• Formatter::PDF#draw_table now exposes column heading formatting options
• Renderers can now be passed :file => “somefile.txt” to save output

There are some flat-out new features as well:

• Data::Feeder allows for custom transformations and filters on data
• Grouping#sigma added (Thanks Dave Nelson)
• Formatter::PDF#draw_text! will draw text at an absolute position, ignoring margins
• Formatter::Template provides a simple templating system for renderer options

Congratulations to the whole Ruport team on a good looking 1.2, and on 2 great years. I wish them many happy returns.

The Last Month

The last month at work (and at home) has been a killer. We just crossed our big deadline, and things look good for a production release in a month or so. I’ve been involved in a Prom (for my daughter); 3 campouts and two hikes (with the scouts); starting an Erlang group here in Provo; rediscovering my love of soccer (or futbol); and fielding a contact from a TV studio about a possible project. Sadly, the next couple of weeks look pretty full too. This hasn’t left me much time time to blog about some things that really deserve it.

Gregory Brown and company have made a 1.0 release of Ruport. This is a huge step forward for them. They’ve been working really hard, and deserve some huge congratulations.

The XRuby has also cut a new release. It sounds like they’re making some good progress as well. I’m looking forward to seeing what their ANTLR 3.0 project accomplishes during the Summer of Code.

Beginning Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax is a nice, new Ruby bookbook from Apress. I’m trying to find enough time to read it and write up a review that will do it justice.