On May 17, 9:53 am, “dan.hatfield” [email protected] wrote:
Ruport is great. I wish it was around when we first starting writing
reports.
Thanks Dan!
We only have a need for PDF report, so we use Austin Z.'s
fantastic pdf library here:http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-pdf/
I’ve been very very pleasantly suprised with the performance Austin
has squeezed out of that library…
I believe Ruport uses it and other libraries as well…
We sure do, it’s the most comprehensive pure Ruby PDF lib out there,
even with its warts.
Recently, we’ve been recommending that people subclass a Ruport PDF
formatter and use our pdf_writer_proxy mainly because we fix several
bugs in PDF::Writer, including the massive memory consumption issue
with Simple Tables and several other issues as well. This also as a
side effect gives you the helpers we’ve added as well.
http://stonecode.svnrepository.com/ruport/trac.cgi/wiki/PdfProxy
We’re working on patching back to PDF::Writer now. Austin hasn’t had
the time to maintain it (even though most of the patches in Ruport
were provided by him!), but he is getting a branch set up where one of
our contributors can start fixing the bugs we fix in Ruport, and
possibly bringing some of the helpers back upstream.
As always it depends on your needs…Ruport can handle the common
cases pretty well IMO.
Yeah, it’s definitely a situation with Ruport in which you’re going to
win if either
a) you have a super common report you want to build
or
b) you want to build your own reporting system from the ground up, but
want unified
support for all the supporting libs and a consistent interface
What I’m hoping is that folks will start contributing higher level
tools to ruport-util
that solve specific needs. That package already includes invoice
support, and we’re
working on things like PDF forms and possibly labels and things like
that, and I’m
hoping as people play around with Ruport and build useful things, that
they’ll
be willing to patch back or at least release gem_plugins…
If you are looking for a gui tool like crystal reports or something, I
couldn’t find much a year ago. I don’t like them anyway but some
people do. 
As far as I know, this is still the case. The only mature project
like this is now in
Java / JRuby and I think it has stagnated. (DataVision)