Gregory Brown has just announced the release of Ruport 1.0, a collection of tools that provide "reporting" functions within Ruby. A Rails plugin, acts_as_reportable, is also available to make report generation from Rails applications easy. Reporting tools work by taking your data, processing it using a report definition, then provide output in various formats (on-screen, to file - such as PDF, to print, etc).

Gregory has put together a short example and release notes for anyone who's not familiar with the concept over at the O'Reilly Ruby blog, and there are also some presentations for your viewing pleasure.

(Thanks to Ruby Inside contributor Hendy Irawan for his additions to this post.)