About Whois
Whois is an intelligent — pure Ruby — WHOIS client and parser.
The library is an open source project, anyone may contribute to it. This is the list of all the contributors.
Acknowledgments
The use of the whois package name was made possible by Cyril Mougel, the original author of the first Ruby Whois gem that was originally released in 2007. Cyril agreed to release the whois package name so that it could be used for this library.
Whois is largely inspired by other notable WHOIS projects, most of all the Debian Whois library written and maintained by Marco D'Itri. Other good ideas and design decisions come from the PERL Net::DRI package.
The parser architecture was originally inspired by the PHPWhois project. The authors puts lot of effort to create WHOIS-specific parsers normalizing the different responses in a single tree-based structure.
Despite I spent weeks reading source code from the available WHOIS libraries, Whois has been built from scratch trying to focus on long-term maintainability and flexibility and cannot be considered a Ruby port of any of other existing WHOIS libraries.
– Simone