From: Paul Hanchett <paulha@...>
Date: 2005-05-05T01:44:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby, Rails and now og

Oooo George---  Now you've got me excited!  ;-)

George Moschovitis wrote:
> David,
> 
> You do not have to create the entire schema before starting your
> application. In fact you don't care for the schema at all when
> developing using Og. During the development phase you can alter your
> classes and Og automatically adapts the schema for you. In this phase
> you generally don't have any real data to care about.
> 
> Btw, Og can work just like AR if needed. Lets say you have a live Blog
> application with the following class used to store Posts:
> 
> class Post
>   property :title, :body, String
>   belongs_to User
> end
> 
> Lets say you want to add a new field in the database called
> create_time. Just use you favourite SQL editor to alter the table and
> then add the following line to your code:
> 
> class Post
>   ...
>   property :create_time, Time
> end
> 
> Extremely easy to do. Moreover, it is relatively easy to automate this
> procces  for most common cases. A future version of Og will
> automatically adapt the schema for a live database.
> 
> While I am at it, let me point out some advantages of Og over AR:
> 
> - DRY: you can use Ruby's OOP features to build your tables using
> inheritance and mixins.
> 
> - DRY: you only define your relations (associations) once. In AR you
> define the relations in SQL (foreign keys etc) and in Ruby code
> (associations)
> 
> - uses standard Ruby objects and not beutified hashes.
> 
> - you can switch the backend RDBMS by changing one line of code.
> 
> - complex patterns like nested_sets/nested_elements can be fully
> encapsulated (In AR you have to know the pattern and manually add
> columns to the schema)
> 
> - You have access to full property/relation metadata for all backends.
> 
> - The schema is generated automatically for you.
> 
> - generates more optimized code for the managed objects.
> 
> I am also working on 'Og-Reloaded'. A brand new implementation of the
> low level code and carefully designed changes to the API to support
> many many new features.
> 
> Stay tuned for an *impressive* new release! 
> 
> regards,
> George.
>