[reportlab-users] [Announcing] News about Geraldo Reports

[Marinho Brandao]

Hello people,

I have good news :)

I've done today the new website of Geraldo Reports [1].

Geraldo is a tool to make business reports easy, that not necessarily
will be PDF files. For a while it just supports PDF and TXT (for file
and matrix printers), but in the future it will supports HTML, ODF,
DOC, XLS, and whatever. It uses the power of ReportLab to make PDF
files and uses also some things from its library.

Geraldo doesn't competes with ReportLab, it is just more like Jasper
or Crystal Reports, ok?

The new website is more like a redesign of the old one, but we want to
have cook book, code snippets and report templates repositories as
soon as possible.

We are near to announce the release 0.4 (maybe in 1 or 2 weeks), with
the main features:

- Caching
- Additional fonts
- Events system
- "Native" charts (using ReportLab functions instead of third part libraries)
- Cross reference tables
- Bar codes
- bugs fixes

Most of these features are already available [2] on the git/svn
repositories [3] and [4] and I'm using them on some projects.

Another important information: I recently knew about a project named
"django-reporting" [5], that makes summaries on the Admin (with no
printing). It is a good tool but a customer mine would like print
those summaries to PDF, so, I made some improvements on it to do it
(and sent a patch). I'm trying to make contact the author to make this
easier.

The problem: Geraldo already had in their repositories a Django app to
integrate Geraldo with Django's Admin.

Solution: I probably will change the name of Geraldo's "reporting", do
some newness I have on my machine, etc.

But, to avoid confusion: django-reporting and Geraldo's "reporting"
are separated things and have different goals.

In the future, Geraldo will have the Reports Server, probably a
pluggable app or a Tornado service (I'm not sure about that), to serve
reports like a BI framework. It will get data from database connection
(with SQL instructions) or NoSQL accessing or, at least, receive data
as a webservice, and generate reports. The main goal is take easy the
integration with other languages and take easy for end users. The
ideas are in my mind, but will late a little.

That's all. Help is very very welcome, whatever you can do to help.

Best regards, speak soon :)

[1] http://www.geraldoreports.org/
[2] http://www.geraldoreports.org/docs/examples/index.html
[3] http://www.geraldoreports.org/docs/examples/index.html
[4] http://geraldo.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/geraldo/
[5] http://code.google.com/p/django-reporting/

-- 
Marinho Brandão (José Mário)
http://marinhobrandao.com/