I've been browsing around the ruby eco-system, trying to put together an idea of exactly when/where I'd be prepared to use Ruby on projects at work.
So far I've only done some file munging tasks (basically using Ruby as a glorified sed/awk). Looking at the last Quiz and finding ruports, and knowing that for a lot of the websites that we have to do here, Rails is perfectly adequate, the main missing piece (for basic database-backed websites) is for "Crystal Reports"
Customers always seem to want some form of reporting feature and they invariably reference Crystal I supose as it's the de-facto.
Having (very recently) struggled with Crystal XI integration with a Java/Spring/Hibernate project, I never want to touch it again - all the documents suck and it is very much focused on Microsoft integration - which is really useless for 99% of teh projects we do here.
On the other hand I think it would be possible to do most of the reports that customers ever need with RMagick + Ruports. Now I'm very inexperienced with Ruby + it's libraries, so I could be way off here, but would it be possile to use a dataset to create a chart? A simple graph, or a pie chart I would think would be possible.
If this would be possible, then one more barrier against using Ruby here will go and make it much more easy to convince people to let us trial Ruby
Thoughts?
Kev