= Ruport 0.5.0 Release, the "One Year Anniversery" edition =
== What is 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.
Ruby Reports provides solid support for processing and formatting all
sorts tabular data. It also includes tools to help with more
specialized things such as graphing and invoice generation. It is
highly extensible, so making it fit your particular needs should be
easy.
== Project News ==
* One year ago today, Ruport 0.1.0 was released. We've come a long way since
then, and I'm delighted to see this project still very alive after
a full year.
* James Healy, winner of RuportDay 2006 and major contributor to Ruport has
become the 4th developer to join the Ruport team. jh is behind the
invoice and
graphing systems, which are some of the coolest features in Ruport.
* Ruport now has a stable branch in SVN. Rather than the previous arbitrary
release numbers, you can now count on a consistent API across 0.5.x, 0.6.x,
etc. There will be maintainence, bug fix, and documentation releases,
however. The SVN trunk remains the bleeding edge of development, which
we will no longer build releases from.
* People have been downloading like crazy! Of course, this is nothing but a bit
of egotistical stats, but we beat our top month, week, and day downloads
since the last release.
* Due to spam, the Ruport wiki now requires an infogami/reddit login. As
long as you are logged in, you should be able to freely edit the wiki.
== What's New in this Release? ==
This is the first release from Ruport's stable branch. We've removed
all obsolete documentation and added several additional tests. Most
of the changes in this release were stability related, but we do have
one major feature change: Scruffy support for SVG graphs.
Scruffy generates beautiful graphs, and is actively being developed.
Having this in Ruport will be very handy, especially as it grows. See
example/line_graph.rb for a simple usage of Scruffy in Ruport.
We've updated the documentation, including the work-in-progress Ruport
Recipe book to start covering some of the new features from the SoC.
Documentation will soon become a number one priority for Ruport,
especially now that the API will probably not change every day. Right
now, docs are still sparse, so do report the areas which you need help
with most, so we can focus on them first.
<boring>
On the stability side, we've come up with a way to tie helper methods
for plugins to specific format engines or groups of format engines.
This is helpful, because it allows you to use the same name for your
helpers across multiple different engines with multiple
implementations. This will hopefully allow many plugin additions to
coexist peacefully.
For details, there is a post on the Ruport blog with examples:
http://rubyurl.com/Nfp
</boring>
Because we are now actively trying to focus on Ruport's stability and
quality instead of just rushing to get a working system together, we
really would love to hear about any bugs you find or feature requests
you may have. See the =Resources= section below for how to contact
us.
== Installation ==
Ruport and its dependencies can easily be installed via rubygems:
gem install ruport
If you have trouble or want to try installing manually, see our install guide:
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 Ruport mailing list to contact
us though. 
== Acknowledgements ==
One year ago, I was working on this thing alone. Now I've got
James,Dinko,and Dudley keeping me company. And we've also got some
great contributors out there who keep fresh code, ideas, and problems
rolling in. To anyone who's helped out over the past year, thank you!
Also, thanks to Google and RubyCentral for the Summer of Code, without
which, I doubt Ruport would have gained so much this summer.