It’s fun to watch the rush to be first to market with a new piece of open source functionality. You probably already know that Amazon released their SimpleDB this week. I was thinking we might whip up a Ruby wrapper but I knew if I just waited a day or so there would already be libraries available. Tonight I checked RubyForge and the three most recent projects are all SimpleDB wrappers:
It will be fun to see which one (or more?) of these gains and keeps mind share. Competition among open source projects is an interesting topic given the abstract nature of the stakes.
Sorry, comments are closed for this article.
December 16th, 2007 at 03:42 AM
Oh come now; fame isn’t too terribly abstract.
December 16th, 2007 at 03:55 AM
True, though I’m not sure you’d call mind share on a Ruby library for a specific Amazon web service “fame” :)
December 17th, 2007 at 05:41 AM
Abstract, smabstract – the winner will be the highest on this list – http://gems.rubyforge.org/stats.html :)
December 17th, 2007 at 04:54 PM
I wonder if it would be useful to have a shared forum (in the place to communicate sense not any specific software sense) for similar/related projects like this. Or is that rubyforce? I know when I was looking for a google chart wrapper I found several references scattered across blogs, google code, rubyforge…
December 18th, 2007 at 02:52 AM
Let me throw my own entry into the ring… http://nytimes.rubyforge.org/amazon_sdb/
I actually built a whole API for a previous limited beta of the SDB (when it was called the Simple Data Service), only to find out Amazon completely revised everything about the calls on me. Thank goodness for TDD and mocking open-uri. How else can you create an API client when the API doesn’t exist yet? Good job Ruby…
Jake
December 18th, 2007 at 07:01 PM
The stakes are who gets to answer the most support email!