Good call -- we'll definitely set one up if there's sufficient need. Until then, feel free to email me; my email address is in the gemspec. I'll write up an FAQ once I have enough questions answered.
re: your immediate question, you still connect to MySQL as normal. Jetpants isn't a server, middleware, framework, or ORM. Rather, it's a toolkit. Jetpants has a command suite that you can use to run its built-in functionality, but it's also a Ruby gem that you can integrate into custom scripts however you'd like.
The functionality is all geared towards managing large DBs (importing/exporting lots of data quickly, copying files quickly, etc) and managing large numbers of servers (promoting/demoting masters and slaves, adding new machines to a pool, rebalancing a shard).
Another question - we are using django so are considering Postgres since there is a python connection pool available. Could Jetpants be potentially used for Postgres? ie how much of the functionality is Mysql specific?
The core functionality is currently very MySQL-specific. In theory a plugin could override a bunch of methods to target Postgres, and maybe even Redis or other persistent data stores with replication and import/export functionality. It would be a lot of work though.
I also made the mistake of putting "mysql" in the names of a few methods. At some point soon I'll change those to more generic names, and alias the old names to the new generic ones.
re: your immediate question, you still connect to MySQL as normal. Jetpants isn't a server, middleware, framework, or ORM. Rather, it's a toolkit. Jetpants has a command suite that you can use to run its built-in functionality, but it's also a Ruby gem that you can integrate into custom scripts however you'd like.
The functionality is all geared towards managing large DBs (importing/exporting lots of data quickly, copying files quickly, etc) and managing large numbers of servers (promoting/demoting masters and slaves, adding new machines to a pool, rebalancing a shard).