From: David Heinemeier Hansson <david@...>
Date: 2005-04-09T22:15:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Rails and Madeleine

> Well, to be accurate it is a Rails app without Active Record. Due to 
> the way it's designed, AR won't work with non-SQL databases (and that 
> will probably never change). However, it would be possible to create 
> something that mimics AR through duck typing. But methods like 
> find_by_sql would be a bit tricky, of course :)

Right. Most of Active Record is designed the way it is because of the 
inherent mismatch between objects and relational data. Madeleine has no 
such mismatch, so there's no mapping to be made in the sense of ORM. 
Hence, it doesn't make that much sense to attempt huddling Madeleine in 
under AR semantics.

Would would make sense, though, is possibly to abstract things like the 
validation framework from Active Record and put it into Active Support. 
That would allow a Madeleine- or ActiveLDAP-backed model to use the 
same validations framework.

I have had an intent to make Madeleine work even more transparently 
with Rails for a long time, though. I don't know when I'll have the 
time to work on it. But basically, I think there's a bunch of stuff 
around managing the Madeleine server instance and calling 
command-generating methods that could be made substantially easier.

Instiki started some of this work. Perhaps someone will take it upon 
themselves to carry on with this. Creating a "version" of Rails that 
defaults to the Madeleine way and make Madeleine super easy to use as a 
model alternative.

Just don't try to shoehorn it in under Active Record semantics. That 
would nullify the benefit of Madeleine (no mapping needed) and leave it 
with only the disadvantages (entire data set in memory, data access 
only through OO system).
--
David Heinemeier Hansson,
http://www.basecamphq.com/   -- Web-based Project Management
http://www.rubyonrails.org/  -- Web-application framework for Ruby
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