From: Kirk Haines <khaines@...>
Date: 2004-02-13T14:58:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Avi Bryant's Kansas package?

On Fri, 13 Feb 2004, Avi Bryant wrote:

> Feel free to do whatever you like with that code.  It was even more of
> a hack than IOWA - literally an evening or two's work, so don't expect
> too much from it.  I would be surprised if there weren't better O/R
> mapping tools for Ruby out there by now, but I haven't kept up.  Oh,
> and make sure you have the version with PragDave's modifications (if
> you pulled it from CVS you should have them).

Yes, what I have is what you had in the Iowa CVS.  What I like about it is 
it's lightweight simplicity.  There are _definitely_ areas where the 
library needs to be fleshed out a bit for robustness, but my initial 
experiments with it show it working pretty well after some light 
modifications to make it work with preexisting database connections so 
that I could use my db connection pooling.

99% of my database accesses are pretty simplistic interactions.  Given a 
key, pull one or more records from a table, with only occasional joins 
between two tables.  And the only _real_ hassle that I've had using SQL 
and manipulating query results directly is one of convenience.  I don't 
like having to explicitly maintain two seperate representations of table 
data -- one in the database and one in some Struct declaration so that I 
have an object to put query results into.  It's ugly and a pain in the 
butt sometimes.  All I really want from a package is for it to do the work 
of looking at a table and making a usable object representation, and for 
it to give me a simple way of making queries and getting the results back 
in one of those object representations.  If there is a better or more 
mature package for Ruby that does this in a lightweight way, I'd love to 
know about it.  If not, though, I'll clean up and strengthen Kansas a bit 
and be happy with it.  It's basically all that I want.
 
> Most recently I've been experimenting with the idea of modelling the
> relational algebra directly as (in my case) first class Smalltalk
> expressions, so that you can compose and iterate over SQL queries in
> an object oriented way instead of through string manipulation - kind
> of like Criteria but more rigorous and (I think) more flexible.  It's
> pretty nifty.  I've blogged about it a couple of times:
> http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView?searchCategory=databases

That's really interesting.  I'll have to read it again in the morning, 
though, and see if my brain can parse the Smalltalk examples better.


Thanks,

Kirk Haines