Using Amazon AWS SimpleDB with Ruby roundup
On my old blog I published a couple of articles about Amazon SimpleDB and tools that can be used to use this distributed Key Value store from ruby.
Since the resources available in those articles and on the slides of my SimpleDB presentation are getting outdated or incomplete I thought I'll spend some time putting together a better collection of pointers useful for people who are looking at getting started with ruby and SimpleDB.
So here's the list of the projects that the SimpleDB beginner should look at:
- Right AWS gem this is a gem that provides an API to interact with many of the Amazon Web Services, including a specific solution for SimpleDB
- Helene is another ruby gem which provides an API for multiple, Amazon Web Services, among them also SimpleDB, of special interest in this case is the fact that Helene provides support for automatic data type conversion (SimpleDB internally stores only strings) and few other facilities like relationships (has_many etc) and validations in a very similar fashion of what activerecord does for SQL backends.
- Raws is again a multi purpose gem implementing a really straight forward hash like API to interact with SimpleDB. Other element of interest of this gem is that is the only one which doesn't use net/http for managing connections to the Amazon Web Services choosing instead to use Typhoeus
- DataMapper adapter for SimpleDB is instead what you should look at if you're looking into using SimpleDB the orm way or, obviously, if you're already using DataMapper. This adapter uses RightAWS to manage the actual communication with SimpleDB (thanks to Dan Mayer for the pointer).
- aws_sdb_bare is instead a more basic gem which provides classes to build requests and parse responses from SimpleDB. The gem by itself doesn't implement any http communication strategy leaving this open to the developer.
Obsolete/broken gems
- aws-sdb is no more maintained and implements a signature level which is deprecated. On top of that the last version of the gem source code went lost when the original repository on github was deleted by the author
- dead_simple_db is no more maintained, is a gem built on top of aws-sdb that provides basic automatic type conversion and ActiveRecord like feature to map objects in SimpleDB entries.
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