Archive for May, 2006

Putting IBM databases on Rails

Antonio Cangiano May 24th, 2006

Last Wednesday at XTech 2006 in Amsterdam, Leon Katsnelson made an annoucement about some of the projects that we’ve been working on at IBM. You can download Leon’s presentation here:

Original PPT | ODP | PDF | SWF

In a matter of days, the Startup Toolkit for DB2 on Rails for Windows will be available online. Providing a one-click solution that will allow you to try out DB2 on Rails.

The toolkit installs both Ruby and Ruby on Rails and includes:

  • IBM DB2 Ruby driver
  • IBM Active Record adapter for DB2
  • 3 mini videos to get you started
  • DB2 Viper (code name for the upcoming release of DB2)

The installed version of Rails generates customized starter pages with useful links which enable you to learn more about DB2 on Rails. As well as config\database.yml, which by default uses the ibm_db2 adapter.

The adapter that I wrote will be released as open source (of course), but so is Sam ’s driver. I love to see IBM’s dedication towards open initiatives. In fact, other projects I’m working on will be made available to the OS community too (some of them in a few month’ s time).

I plan to write articles and create videos about DB2 on Rails for this blog. More interesting things to come. Stay tuned. ;-)

Download Ruby 1.9 for Windows

Antonio Cangiano May 2nd, 2006

We all enjoy the stability and quality of Ruby but I think it is important to test the latest code as well, to help improve future versions (and keep ourselves up to date as well). Many Windows users are probably put off by the idea of getting the latest code and having to compile and build it on Windows. I decided to include in the sidebar, Win32 builds of the latest stable and nightly snapshots for this very reason. This means that you can try the latest stable – or the unstable 1.9 – version of Ruby on your winbox without having to compile anything, just unzip and enjoy. ;-)
I don’t know how useful this is for the community in general, but if your feedback is positive, I can update the builds frequently.