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