I just discovered Roo on RubyForge. Looking at the documentation it looks like a FasterCSV alternative.
This gem allows you to access the content of
- Open-office spreadsheets (.ods)
- Excel spreadsheets (.xls)
- Google (online) spreadsheets
I can not see it replacing FasterCSV at the moment, as a lot of the features presented are available through FasterCSV.
In my mind, the only thing separating this from FasterCSV is the ability to save your spreadsheets to Google Docs. This is cool because one could share a spreadsheet with a customer, and write generated reports to it for automated reporting.
I happen to store all my hours worked in a Google document, so this would be great for generating excel reports by month to give to my employer.
“FasterCSV is intended as a replacement to Ruby‘s standard CSV library. It was designed to address concerns users of that library had and it has three primary goals:”
“With Roo, you can access the content of OpenOffice-, MS-Excel- (.xls and .xlsx files) and Google Spreadsheets.”
Why do you think roo will ever be an alternative for FasterCSV? Roo does a completely different thing than FasterCVS. Roo deals with spreadsheet files and is not a CSV library.
It was never intended to replace FasterCSV.
-Thomas