= Ruport 0.5.3, the "Sleepy Turtle" 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 ==
The developers of Ruport (James,Dinko,Dudley,and myself) will be
meeting via IRC on Monday, 2006.09.18 at 14:30 UTC
We'll be talking about plans for Ruport 0.6.x as well as tons of other
development related stuff. Our discussion would likely be boring to
end users, but potential contributors to Ruport or general geeks might
want to lurk at this time.
There is also some API tweaking and feature addition going on in
Ruport's trunk. Since a merge of these features into stable will
happen in the next couple weeks, testers might want to start trying
out some of the stuff in trunk to see what they think. If you aren't
already following us via SVN/Trac, then either ignore this or catch up
with us on the mailing list 
Random Ego Statistic: Our mailing list now has 50 subscribers. Yay!
== What's New in this Release? ==
This release is 100% maintainence. We've uncovered and fixed a
handful of annoying bugs in Ruport, added some tests, and did some
internal cleanup. If you haven't run into problems, you won't notice
much difference in this release, but should update anyway to avoid
them in the future.
See the CHANGELOG for details, but here's a quick summary:
- rope's build.rb was broken if you used it to generate multiple reports
- I finally removed the 'mandatory data attribute' for Format::Engine
- reorder() was creating tons of unnecessary copies of column_names
- Plugin#rendering_options and Plugin#options now point at two different
objects.
- Printing out empty tables as text no longer throws an error.
== 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 . I would recommend subscribing to the
blog since I tend to mention bugs or interesting new features or event
announcements there.
If you need help, We *love* when people use IRC(#ruport) or the Ruport
mailing list. You can find info about both of these on the Ruport
website.
Finally, Dinko has been doing periodic articles about Ruport for the
Stone Code blog. These 'Ruport News' articles are great if you want a
very high level look at Ruport from time to time. On the web:
http://www.stonecode.org/blog/?cat=14
Via RSS: http://www.stonecode.org/blog/?feed=rss2&cat=14
== Acknowledgements ==
Greg Gibson of BTree Technology was responsible for uncovering almost
all of the bugs in this release when I was trying to demonstrate
things to him or do jobs for him 