From: thunk <gmkoller@...>
Date: 2010-03-06T10:30:08+09:00
Subject: "Self Organizing Record" Idea


(and the real question on my mind lately...)

I'm using Class instances directly as "records"  and intend to use
CouchDB (or another "document" base) to pull them up when the system
gets larger.

Things are working out great with only 20 instances and we are saving
a lot of time versus anything else for now.

Recently I started thinking of other potential advantages of doing
this as we grow toward 400 or so records.

(The object returns an array of hashes for each methods that
correspond roughly to relational db "fields")

So, I have been starting to think about a scheme that would go
(basically) like this:

1.  a new instance method might be added to each class dynamically and/
or new instance data might be added to the class.

2.  the object is "marshaled" out with the new methods/variables/data

3. Now the class is reloaded  and it is "pretty printed" into a
readable format (less comments, I assume).

and whoalla...  the class will be "corrected" without being edited
directly.

This seems pretty "effective" (and a little too clever?) to me, I
haven't tested it yet , but with Ruby this stuff has usually worked
out for me so far..  any comments on this?

Thanks,

Thunk