Rails - Sep 2005 - 2nd try: want official DB2 drivers for Ruby? IBM wants to hear from you

A few people said that they missed this (perhaps due to recent mailing list
problems) so here it is again:

IBM has invited the Ruby community to email it directly, so it can measure
interest in official DB2 drivers for Ruby.

This is a community petition to IBM, requesting that IBM develops a set of
Ruby drivers for the DB2 database.

First up - this is a friendly petition.  IBM/Grant Hutchison has been very
open to this idea and is interested in forming links to the Ruby community.

***** quickstart - for those in a hurry
If you would like to request that IBM develop a set of "official" DB2
drivers for Ruby, send an email to
ghutchis-G1DYhSM1WHTQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org with a subject line
of "Friendly community petition - IBM DB2 drivers for Ruby".

***** in the Perl world

In the Perl world, IBM developed and maintains the DB2 drivers for Perl.  It
seems logical that they should also develop a set of DB2 drivers for Ruby.

***** Michael Neumann''s valued previous work in this field

Whilst Michael Neumann has done an awesome job of developing a set of Ruby
drivers for DB2 http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/ruby-db2/ , the project
status says
 Status: works (but not enough testing) , and says:
 Yet, only the following low-level CLI functions are available:
SQLAllocHandle, SQLFreeHandle,
SQLConnect, SQLDisconnect,
SQLPrepare, SQLNumResultCols,
SQLDescribeCol,
SQLExecDirect, SQLExecute,
SQLRowCount, SQLFetch,
SQLGetData,
SQLEndTran, SQLGetDiagRec
SQLDataSources SQLColAttributes SQLFetchScroll
SQLTables

Michael Neumann''s work is to be applauded and appreciated - thanks
Michael.

It would be a great thing also if IBM was to build a set of drivers that are
expose the full functionality of DB2, and are subject to IBM''s testing
and
quality assurance processes, and had the "IBM official DB2 drivers"
stamped
on them.  IT managers and operations departments will get warm fuzzy
feelings from code that uses such drivers.

Building enterprise class applications using Ruby and Ruby on Rails requires
drivers that ideally are developed by the database developer (IBM in this
case).

***** the Ruby contact at IBM

The Ruby community has been given permission to directly email email Grant
Hutchison Technical Manager, Developer Initiatives - Cloudscape, DB2,
Informix.  Here is Grant''s email:

Andrew,
Please go ahead and use my name and email. I would be happy to hear more
about the request for IBM to get more engaged with the Ruby community and I
am the proper contact with IBM''s DB2 team to field such requests.
Please
suggest a common subject header so it is easy for me to handle the
potential volume. Based on the response I receive I will build a proposal
to get more involved.
Thanks,

Grant Hutchison
Technical Manager, Developer Initiatives - Cloudscape, DB2, Informix IBM DB2
Information Management Software
ghutchis-G1DYhSM1WHTQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org

***** so what do I need to do to express my support for IBM developing DB/2
drivers for Ruby?

Simple - send an email to Grant Hutchison
ghutchis-G1DYhSM1WHTQT0dZR+AlfA@public.gmane.org with a subject
line of "Friendly community petition - IBM DB2 drivers for Ruby".

If you''ve got more to say to Grant then put your text in the message
body.

thanks

Andrew Stuart