Most of my "reports" these days are graphs. Tab-delimited text -> R frequently
gets the job done for publication quality work. I have various levels of
control over gnuplot and PLplot; the latter being preferred with large numbers
of points. I just did a rush job of knitting clashing data streams that ended
with a file being imported into LibreOffice Calc and saved to .xls.
A couple of years ago, I used a PDF printer driver with Dolphin to create some
files I needed; that whole thing has since been folded into Seaside (great!)
and then completely destroyed by what we will call politics - don't ask -
nothing wrong with the science or the technology though.
I have been doing a lot of writing lately. To quote a professional writer
whose work I followed for a long time, "I enjoy having written". I would be
going nuts were it not for LaTeX. Generating LaTeX source would be easy.
Using OSProcess to run pdf2latex should be simple (I think). Formatting the
output would be the most challenging part. For examples of what can be done,
have a look here:
http://www.cs.duke.edu/brd/NIH/tips/
and perhaps at the res.cls style.
I agree that we should not try to do everything in Smalltalk, or more to the
point, that we should not limit ourselves to what we have time to write.
Dolphin's COM integration saved me a couple of times. Pharo should have
something similar, probably centered on connectivity with Java (as a
cross-platform answer to COM Automation??).
Bill
________________________________________
From: [email protected]
[[email protected]] On Behalf Of Johan Brichau
[[email protected]]
Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2011 1:08 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [Pharo-project] Report generation? (I need an update)
On 08 Jun 2011, at 17:37, Esteban Lorenzano wrote:
> So... my question:
> what do you use to generate reports to clients?
> if pdf generation... which strategy?
We use Jasper reports: www.jasperforge.org
It's a feature-rich library for generation of any report to about any format
you can think of, and it's open source.
The downside is: it is a Java library but we use http communication between our
Seaside app and the jasper application.
In the future, I hope to get my own Javaconnect library (working in
Visualworks) rolling completely in Pharo to have native communication from
Pharo to Java.
In the meantime, you might try JNIPort since that one has Pharo version already.
We can try to develop everything in Smalltalk but we will fail to keep up.
Johan
