On 4/27/07, Peter B. [email protected] wrote:
Gregory,
If I wanted to create an “enterprise dashboard” that laid out a
collection of
tables and charts on a single (web?) page would Ruport be the right
tool?
I’m not sure, really. I do think that Ruport could be helpful for
that, especially if you’re doing a bunch of ActiveRecord stuff.
acts_as_reportable is pretty good at getting your data into a
standard, easily manipulatable form, so even if you can’t make use of
our built in formatting support or the tools we have in ruport-util,
you can still gain something there.
If you end up needing to talk to a bunch of different libraries to
build such an app, the biggest thing Ruport does for you is once you
wrap the libs, you get a standard formatting interface. This gets to
be really powerful, because it means all your process code stays
independent of the formatting code.
That’s really the core of Ruport does. It takes disjoint parts and
mallets them together, and tries to make it easy to do that. There is
very little it does as a toolset that can’t be done without it, but I
really do see (at least in my own work), the benefits of having a
structured system to work with.
The problem you are describing is a super common interest among our
users. I really wish some of you would get together and build
something that does this! (Whether it uses Ruport or not.) Once
things get rolling, I’d be happy to try to help make Ruport a
comfortable fit for things like this, and support it however I can.
But to sum it up, Ruport offers a pretty blank canvas to start with,
so it’s not going to make any particular task a dream. It’s just
meant to keep you from having nightmares. 
The person to talk to about web based stuff is not me, but Mike
Milner. He may not be subbed here, but he’s active on the Ruport list
and would be happy to field these kinds of questions.
warm regards,
-gregory
