PowerRuby Community Edition 2 was released on October 20, 2018. It is in fact the fusion of Developer Edition and Community Edition: the component covered by license key (which characterized the Developer Edition) has thus become part of the packaging of the CE2 version as option 1. This option allows the use of a gem (so called the additional modules in Ruby jargon) that allows access to DB2. The grace period is only 7 days but – for registration – you can receive a license key valid 7 years from the date of release (so until October 20, 2025).
The entire PowerRuby project is the result of an investment by the British company Dancerace Ltd to explore new possibilities for the use of IBM i architecture in the field of application development. In this sense, the heart of the operation was to implement the extensions aimed at integration to db2. I will just point out three aspects of this integration here.
The first aspect is Unicode. All web development allows you to use UTF-8 encoding uniformly, but problems can occur when you access the database. One approach would be to create all tables with text fields defined to handle Unicode. In this way we would not have enhanced a feature of DB2: DB2 for IBM i is able to convert the encoding to write and read -selectively for each field – without imposing anything on the application. It was therefore a question of offering in the definition of the fields (the so-called “migrations” of Rails) the possibility of indicating field by field a specific CCSID: and that is what we did.
The second aspect is the integration of foreign key support into the elegant logic offered by Rails’ Active Record. All definition operations are borne by the middleware Rails which also adopts here the famous concept CoC (Convention-over-Configuration)
The third very elegant aspect (for cleaning the application code) is having integrated the transaction support offered by Active Record. Multiple actions on the database can then be collected within a single Unit-of-Work with clear syntax.
The starting point to delve into is the official documentation.
Support (and license key request) is carried out through the support@powerruby.com address.
Enjoy PowerRuby CE2!
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