RSWC Projects


The projects below are under active development. Click on the titles for more information.

md2pdf – Simple conversion of Markdown to PDF using Prawn

md2pdf simplifies the process of turning Markdown formatted text documents into print-ready PDF files without the need to go through an intermediate HTML phase. The command natively, and in pure Ruby, parses the Markdown document and uses Prawn to directly generate a correctly formatted PDF.

Prawn is the fastest pure Ruby PDF generation library available. It really is pretty cool and takes most of the ouch out of generating print-ready documents.

  • Ryan Stenhouse
  • Tuesday, November 09, 2010
gpgr – Easy GPG / PGP Encryption in Ruby

gpgr is a lightweight and fast wrapper around the gpg command commonly found on Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.

It is only concerned with quickly and easily encrypting files, to that end aside from some basic key-management support, it will not wrap any other parts of the gpg functionality.

If you need something that will elegantly and quickly encrypt files for you and make managing the keys used within your application for this purpose a snap, use this. If not, use something else.

  • Ryan Stenhouse
  • Friday, March 19, 2010
Radiant CMS Liveblog Extension

This extension adds self-contained liveblogging support to RadiantCMS. It’s designed to have no external dependancies and should work just fine out of the box on most Radiant installations.

Note: The development and most of the testing of this extension has been against the yet-to-be-released version 0.9 of Radiant, however it should be compatible with All 0.8 and higher installations.

  • Ryan Stenhouse
  • Saturday, March 13, 2010
Prawn::Graph – Simple Graphing for Prawn

Prawn is the fastest pure Ruby PDF generation library available. It really is pretty cool and takes most of the ouch out of generating print-ready documents.

One common use of generating PDFs in web applications is to provide ‘Reports’ of some kind or another to your customers. Prawn already has fantastic support for putting tables in your documents; but one part that’s currently missing is the ability to natively add graphs and charts to your documents as easily as you can with a table.

Prawn::Graph aims to add this functionality to Prawn by using the native PDF drawing tools Prawn exposes and a friendly single-method call to draw the graph.

  • Ryan Stenhouse
  • Friday, February 12, 2010
Jobby Rails – Efficient background tasks in Rails

Jobby Rails is a lightweight interface to Jobby, a gem which allows many concurrent ‘jobs’ to be run asynchronously from one another.

Jobby Rails provides everything you need to pass on long running tasks, to Jobby to be executed. What makes this solution unique to all the other is that (up to a specified maximum of child processes), Jobby executes your tasks in parallel.

Jobs and Freelancers (See the Documentation) are given your Rails environment and can access all of your Models and so on. Jobby (and Jobby Rails) is COW Friendly if your Ruby Interpreter supports it.

  • Ryan Stenhouse
  • Sunday, January 10, 2010