The Ensembl database makes genomic features available via its Genome Browser. It is also possible to access the underlying data through a Perl API for advanced querying. We have developed a full-featured Ruby API to the Ensembl databases, providing the same functionality as the Perl interface with additional features. A single Ruby API is used to access different releases of the Ensembl databases and is also able to query multi-species databases.
Availability and implementation: Most functionality of the API is provided using the ActiveRecord pattern. The library depends on introspection to make it release independent. The API is available through the Rubygem system and can be installed with the command gem install ruby-ensembl-api.