Prawn is a new pure Ruby PDF generation library developed primarily by Gregory Brown.

Back in March, Gregory tried to raise $13000 so he could spend six months working on Ruby-related open source projects. He eventually raised $5525 from the community (plus $5000 from Ruby Central and $500 from Mountain West RubyConf) and has spent the last few months working on Prawn.

Prawn can be installed from a pull from GitHub or, for those of us who are less adventurous, with a gem install prawn. Once installed, you can give it a quick test run:

require ‘prawn’

Prawn::Document.generate(“test.pdf”) do
font “#{Prawn::BASEDIR}/data/fonts/DejaVuSans.ttf”
text “this is a test ” * 100
end

Prawn comes with 11 typefaces, including Helvetica, Courier, DejaVuSans, Times, and everyone’s favorite – Comic Sans. Read More

HTTParty is a new Ruby library by John Nunemaker (of railstips.org fame) that makes it a snap to build classes that can use Web-based APIs and related services. At its simplest, you include the HTTParty module within a class, which gives your class a “get” method that can retrieve data over HTTP. Further directives, however, instruct HTTParty to parse results (XML, JSON, and so on), define base URIs for the requests, and define HTTP authentication information.

HTTParty’s simplicity is demonstrated in the most “complex” example John gives in his introduction post – a Representative class that can retrieve information about US Representatives from whoismyrepresentative.com:

require ‘rubygems’
require ‘httparty’

class Representative
include HTTParty
base_uri ‘whoismyrepresentative.com’
default_params :output =’json’
format :json

def self.find_by_zip(zip)
get(‘/whoismyrep.php’, :query ={:zip =zip})
end

def self.get_all_by_name(last_name)
get(‘/getall_reps_byname.php’, :query ={:lastname =last_name})
end
end

puts Representative.get_all_by_name(‘Donnelly’).inspect
# {“results”=[{"district"="2", "last"="Donnelly", "first"="Joe", "state"="IN", "party"="D"}]}

That code will work for you after a simple gem install httparty. Read More