Ruby Fans Please Contribute!
September 25th, 2007
Back in October 2004 the UK Ingres User Association hosted a user group meeting in Blackpool. For those of you unfamiliar with Blackpool, it’s a popular seaside resort in the UK, with a spectacular stretch of illuminations. As a first time visitor to Blackpool I took some time out between the conference and the “networking” at the bar to explore the beachfront, and I was bemused to find a series of “Please Contribute” signs lighting the way. As we had just contributed Ingres to open source I was able to easily work a photo of one of those signs into my presentation the following morning.
I was reminded of that photograph earlier today when discussing our newly posted Ruby Driver with some colleagues. The driver originated as a community contribution funded by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children were making use of Ruby before it was on our list of interesting development platforms and funded a development project to build a Ruby driver to Ingres.
The engineering team has taken that initial contribution, made it a little more robust and scalable and built Rails support around it. I must admit that I haven’t yet toyed with Ruby or Ruby on Rails, but I’ve a couple of long-haul flights on the horizon and I might get to it during one of those flights. I’d love to hear feedback from any Ruby users out there who may already have received word of the Ruby Driver via the Ingres Tech Blog or from those of you hearing of it for the first time here.
We at Ingres are always grateful for your contributions, whether large or small, and I’m sure that the community at large is appreciative too.
