== Ruport 0.4.99 : The “Snakes on a Plane” Edition ==
This is the 10th and last release of Ruport in Google’s Summer of Code
Program
Because there is a lot of project news in this release, i’ve saved
it to the end for those who want to skip it. Or for those who love
our project news, I’ve saved the best for last.
== What’s Ruport ==
Ruby Reports is a software library that aims to make the task of
reporting less tedious and painful. It provides tools for data
acquisition, database interaction, formatting, and parsing/munging.
== What’s new ==
This release shows of the fruits of RuportDay2006, which include
SVG::Graph integration, a whole lot of API documentation, a bassinet
full of bug fixes, and finally, some real error messages.
To see a complete list of changes due to RuportDay:
http://rubyurl.com/Tkk
To see some sample output of the SVG graph support:
http://ruport.infogami.com/RuportDayButterChurn
NOTE: This will be the last release of ruport before it is split into
stable / development branches, so be sure to send in those bug reports
and feature requests!
== Download ==
The easiest way: gem install ruport
However, we have detailed install instructions available at:
http://ruport.infogami.com/Installation
== Resources ==
You can find more-or-less all of the information we have available via:
http://ruport.infogami.com
We love when people use IRC(#ruport) or the mailing list to contact
us though. 
== Project News ==
= RuportDay 2006 =
Though Summer of Code has done a ton to help Ruport’s development,
this release and it’s features are a direct result of the RuportDay
contest, sponsored by BTree Technology.
4 contributors and the Ruport developers spent a day hacking away at
Ruport, closing a grand total of 22 tickets on Trac.
The overall winner, who deserves massive props is James H., who
introduced SVG Graph support, as well as a sizeable chunk of
documentation to the project
Ibroadfo worked until the last minute, and put in some great work
adding features and documentation patches.
Finally, our third place winner was Eric P., who gained points for
both a basic rails demo, and for giving us some great ideas for our
acts_as_reportable support for Rails/Ruport integration.
JEG2 also came in and helped cleanup Rope a bit, so thanks!
There is a very long chat log of the entire day, complete with all the
changesets and the ticket openings/closings being reported:
http://geeksoc.org/~ibroadfo/ruportday.log
= Upcoming Branch =
This release marks the final ‘It’s a little broken here and there, and
really nice over here’ version of Ruport. We will be releasing Ruport
0.5.0 on August 28th (Ruport’s 1 year anniversery) and starting a
stable branch for it, freezing the API.
Development will continue towards 1.0 in trunk (the ‘development’
branch), but there will be a usable 0.5.x stable branch which will
stay the same, except for bug fixes, docs, and added tests. We’re
hoping that for people who are using Ruport to do production things
already, this will prevent insane breakage and surprises during
upgrades.
= Vacation =
I will be visiting family in florida from the 16th until the 28th, so
my availability will be questionable. Rest assured, Dudley will be
handling my usual duties and wearing the crusty old Ruport sea
captain’s hat while I’m gone.
= Arbitrary promotions (or something) =
James H. has been hacking on Ruport a lot. (He wrote the base for
the Invoice engine), so he now has SVN access to the project as a sort
of ‘contributor++’. So if ever Dinko,Dudley,and I get swept off by a
Tornado or something, and you need a patch applied to Ruport, he’ll be
your man.
Dudley has been working on Ruport for months, and became an official
developer earlier this summer. Due to his continued efforts, I’ve
given him the title Developer 2.0 Not one of us know what that means,
but it may or may not include AJAX and folksonomy and the word Beta.
In all seriousness though, I just want to thank him for being a great
help this summer.
= We vendored SVG::Graph =
I hate vendoring other people’s code, I feel like it doesn’t give
them proper ‘propz’. A quick glance didn’t show an easy way to get in
touch with the developer of SVG::Graph though, and there isn’t a gem
out there for it that I could find, so it’s vendored in Ruport.
If the developer of this software is on RubyTalk, please contact me
and we can talk about maybe getting a gem out there for SVG::Graph or
at least we can talk about how you’d prefer to see it packaged in
Ruport.
= That’s all =
I know this news was long, so I hope putting it at the end helped.
Thanks to everyone for your support and contributions to Ruport. It’s
really been a fun summer working on it!