Ruby Invoicing Gem released

Published by Martin Kleppmann on 12 Feb 2009.

I have just made the first public release of a new open source project – the Ruby Invoicing Framework, a bunch of tools and a structure which can be used inside commercial (web) applications to handle billing of customers, tax calculations, and other financial matters. Full announcement and background story here.

Some highlights from the announcement:

After learning the basics of accounting, I still find it dead boring. And that is really the reason why I took the Bid for Wine code in January 2009 and started extracting a general-purpose finance handling framework out of it: I wanted to find a neat representation of the data, one which made both me as a developer happy and also satisfied the accountants; and I wanted to package it up so that I wouldn’t have to think about the financial stuff any more than necessary: I wanted to make it go away, not by ignoring it, but by automating it as much as possible, and by explaining it in a way which doesn’t require you to know any accounting jargon.

What I have now released, the Invoicing gem version 0.1.0, is the combination of all the experience we gathered while developing Bid for Wine with several weeks of my full-time work. Despite the young version number, this is already a pretty solid and stable framework. I waited with the first release until I felt that the core API was well enough thought out that I could minimize the number of backwards-incompatible changes in the upcoming minor versions up to 1.0.

Please help me spread the word: take a look at the invoicing gem website, tag your tweets with #invgem, subscribe to the invoicing gem news feed, give the gem a try, browse the docs and the source, and let me know what you think!