A DB admin interface written in Rails
Posted by Ivan Schneider on October 21, 2008 at 08:44 PM
The Rails Rumble 2008 took place last week end and we took this contest as an opportunity to bootstrap a project we had in mind for some time. I teamed up with Jessy Bernal, with whom I am developing at Massive Brain Games, and Sylvain Utard, the creator of Live On Bankiz. The said project is a DB interface written in Rails and meant as a replacement for the classic phpMyAdmin. Not an extremely original idea I must confess but we found nonetheless a few reasons that motivated this project.
First of all, it's kind of annoying to install a php application on an otherwise ruby only server. We also find that the phpMyAdmin is quite old and gray, not really up to date with the latest javascript tricks we are all now accustomed to. Finally we thought there was some room for innovation by taking advantage of the different conventions Rails has set up for DB schemas.
With these two days of rush we were able to develop an alpha version of the product. We're fully aware that there are quite a few bugs and that it's far from complete. However it still makes an acceptable proof of concept which demonstrates a bunch of interesting features. You can check out the Rails Rumble deployment or watch the screencast.
rbDB web-based mysql admin with conventions from Jessy Bernal on Vimeo
We named the application rbDB and will soon opensource it. We hope that we'll find people interested in this project and that the first step they will take in supporting us will be to vote for our application on Rails Rumble.
UPDATE: rbDB is on github
Comments
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Looks great. Any chance of the same thing for PostgreSQL?
Thanks. PostgreSQL isn't our next milestone but we'll keep it in mind.
Great choice for a RR08 project! Have you thought about contacting the InstantRails project to see about getting it bundled?
(And any chance of getting a real voice for the screencast? The robonarration is really hard to tollerate)
@Chris Bloom: That's an interesting idea, but I think we're not there yet; we only worked for two days on this project and there's still a lot to do (many bugfixes I guess and we've got a few other interesting features in our sleeves). Regarding the screencast, we'll surely rework the presentation if the project grows and we'll eventually add a real voice to it. Once again it was in a rush and Castanaut proved to be a quite handy tool for such a situation.
Hi, Nice app. I use postgres though - maybe you could make commands in some sort of backend - postgres users could replace it with backend working with postgresql :)
Looks interesting... How does it compare to SQL Buddy? (http://sqlbuddy.com/)
Great idea for a project, looks like you managed to add quite a lot of functionality in a short space of time. Looks like it could become a very useful tool.
Hey guys, congratulations! You've done a great job!
I hope You will appear on my Rails Rumble ballot soon! =)
This looks really really good!
Is there a download available somewhere so that I can play with it on my server?
Nice idea, but the audio on the video is not loud enough, and the video is too fuzzy.
Voting is just about done and it looks like your project is about #13, which isn't too bad with well over 120 entries. I strongly suggest you keep up with this, maybe it would be a good Google Summer of Code project for next year (maybe to add PostgreSQL?) For a two day effort it was fantastic. A higher res video might also be useful, though I didn't think the voice was too bad myself.
Great work!! Don't give up, this art of work must be opensourced. All other incoming guys, don't forget to support this project.
Hey this looks awesome - Where can I download it? Great job and I think you should have won!
Definitely time someone re-wrote phpMyAdmin. It's a great tool, but definitely dated. Great work, I hope to be on the list to test this out.
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