Open Source Ruby Libraries

Prawn is a pure Ruby PDF generation library that provides a lot of great functionality while trying to remain simple and reasonably performant. Extensive text rendering support, including flowing text and limited inline formatting options. Comprehensive internationalization features, including full support for UTF-8 based fonts, right-to-left text rendering, fallback font support, and extension points for customizable text wrapping. Support for PDF outlines for document navigation. Low level PDF features, allowing users to create custom extensions by dropping down all the way to the PDF object tree layer. (Mostly useful to those with knowledge of the PDF specification). If you are looking for a highly flexible PDF document generation system, Prawn might be the tool for you. It is not a reporting tool or a publishing toolchain, though it could be fairly easily used to build those things.

Pedestal is a set of libraries that we use to build services and applications. It runs in the back end and can serve up whole HTML pages or handle API requests. There are a lot of tools in that space, so why did we build Pedestal? We had two main reasons. Pedestal is designed for APIs first. Most web app frameworks still focus on the "page model" and server-side rendering. Pedestal lets you start simple and add that if you need it. Pedestal makes it easy to create "live" applications. Applications must respond with immediate feedback even while some back-end communication goes on. Pedestal makes it easy to deliver server-sent events and asynchronous updates. Pedestal works with a huge variety of containers and deployment options. Deploy applications or microservices on unikernels, Docker containers, or JAR files. Pedestal supports Tomcat, Jetty, Immutant (with Undertow), Vert.x, nginx, and Netty.