From: Bob Hutchison Date: 2005-10-26T22:11:05+09:00 Subject: Re: The "perfect" ORM? On Oct 25, 2005, at 8:11 PM, Hal Fulton wrote: > For many weeks I have had this at the back of my mind. > > I want a really good ORM that is highly non-intrusive > (e.g., I don't have to inherit and I don't have to > clutter my classes and objects with metadata). > Do you want an ORM? or do you want a way to persist classes in a non- intrusive way? Be careful what you ask for :-) I am putting the final touches on a project () that I've been working on for a while now. It has its roots in a Java tool that I've been working on since 1998 or so and that has been used in eight or nine quite large commercial products (500k to 2000k lines of code). There is a Common Lisp version as well. I am working through a small but relatively complex example (in Ruby) just to make sure I've not missed anything that Ruby needs (and a good thing I did too). This will address some of the issues you raise and that you've mentioned in previous posts. It is unobtrusive as long as you play along. Persistence is only one of the goals of the tool, it is also trying to provide a useful framework for projects that use it. There is more information on my weblog in the ruby category , a few additional articles in the xampl category talking about the Java or CL version, if you are curious. The articles mostly talk about xampl as an XML binding tool -- which it also does do. Right now, xampl is targeted at new code. Fitting it into existing code can be done but requires some familiarity with the tool, and there is no guarantee that it would be all that useful in the end. > > Someone told me that this was much the way Hibernate > works in Java. I can't comment. > > So anyway, this is one of my highest priorities -- to > make an ORM (that works the way I like) to wrap > KirbyBase. (With additional code, it should/could wrap > any other db, of course.) > > Logan's KirbyRecord was a step in the right direction, > it seemed to me. But it was like ActiveRecord -- it > forced you to store your metadata in your own objects. > > Og is cool, but is even more intrusive. > > In case anyone is morbidly curious, I want this so that > I can continue work on Tycho without getting bogged > down in data storage issues. (Someone teased me at the > conference that a year had gone by, and Tycho still > hadn't progressed any. And he wonders how that spider > got in his salad.) > > Anyhow: Who knows Hibernate and can comment on its > usefulness as a model? > > And who if anyone is interested in working on this > project? > > > Thanks, > Hal > > > > > > ---- Bob Hutchison -- blogs at Recursive Design Inc. -- Raconteur --