Open Source Web Application Frameworks like PHP Cake, Ruby on Rails, Python Django or Perl Catalyst are becoming more and more popular among web developers. Even in the enterprise world, that is dominated by Java, those frameworks are gaining ground as they combine the simpleness and power of a scripting language with a strong development framework.

New Ruby/Informix Website

If you are an Informix fan - you probably are as you are visiting The Informix Zone - and you are looking for a powerful, easy to learn and robust programming language, take a deeper look at Ruby. Combined with the Ruby on Rails framework, Ruby is an extremely efficient language for developing web based applications. Applications that probably need a high performance OLTP cluster database like IDS.

Ruby/Informix 0.6.0 released

There are two important additions in this release:

• Test suite
• Exception classes for Informix errors

Please read the following changelog for details.

This is a maintenance release.

The code that interprets DATETIME columns had a bug.

Time objects were being instantiated with incorrect values when the original ones had leading zeroes and the DATETIME column was defined with the HOUR TO SECOND qualifier.

Thanks to Daniel Bush
for his report.

Home page: http://ruby-informix.rubyforge.org
Download from: http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-informix/

Ruby/Informix is a Ruby extension for connecting to IBM Informix Dynamic Server, written in ESQL/C.

It is being developed and heavily tested on Solaris/SPARC. It has been reported to work on Linux, Windows and HP-UX.

There are four major enhancements in this release:

• Use of BigDecimal for MONEY/DECIMAL columns
• Resource management by means of blocks for statements, cursors and connnections
• Support for SLOB status and storage characteristics information gathering
• Thread safe

Along with bug fixes, more documentation and new handy methods.

Special thanks to Guy Bowerman, Jonathan Leffler and Logan Capaldo for their feedback and help.

Not long ago, around mid-2005, I was enchanted by the beauty of Ruby on Rails. Not much time passed until I found where the beauty came from.

My name is Gerardo Santana and I'm the author of the Ruby driver for Informix, the RDBMS that powers the largest database of employees (for a personnel management and payment system) and the largest database of students (for a student information system) in the state of Chiapas, at my work place.

Before deciding to write the Ruby driver, I tried the Perl driver first (Python was not an option since at the time it was in beta.) But after knowing and enjoying Ruby on Rails, I decided to rewrite one of our systems with it. Not having the ActiveRecord adapter for Informix, not even a native Ruby driver for Informix, drove me to give Informix not one, but two gems: Ruby/Informix and Rails/Informix.

Creating a Powerful Mixture

This article describes the database interfaces of popular script languages like Perl, PHP, Python or Ruby which provide direct access to data stored in Informix Dynamic Server.