[Catalyst] ActiveRecord for Perl

[Matt S Trout]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 11:05:44AM -0400, John Siracusa wrote:
> > In the meantime, RDBO is a brilliantly well-written system and if you're with
> > jcs in not seeing the point of the (functional-ish/set-arithmetic-ish
> > resultset concept) and not wanting to be able to subclass to override at any
> > level of the process, it's a very useful option.
> 
> IME, it's not a matter of "not seeing the point" of a resultset approach,
> but rather a preference for a particular API type.  That is, it's a matter
> of taste rather than one of ignorance.

Hmm. I think that's a semantic mismatch, that's basically what I meant. That
you don't see the point for your purposes doesn't mean that you don't
understand why others do for theirs.

I still personally believe resultset chaining to be a lisp-vs-blub-ism, and
find that the majority of people who try it find it addictive, but that could
purely be a matter of my sample self-selecting.

> > I usually tell people to examine both and choose whichever best suits their
> > project - the experienced developers seem -usually- to end up going for
> > "DBIx::Class by default, Rose::DB::Object when they need speed over features"
> > but that's my personal experience from discussion with a few hundred perl
> > developers, not a statement of intent/recommendation.
> > Rose::DB::Object
> 
> Although performance may attract people to RDBO initially, I think the
> people who decide to stick with it do so for other reasons: they like the
> API, it has some particular feature they want, etc.  I've never taken a
> survey, but that's my impression based on RDBO mailing list traffic and so
> on.  I can tell you that I'd personally keep using RDBO even if it was the
> slowest ORM, but perhaps that's not too surprising ;)

I tend to think in terms of conceptual mapping rather than in terms of
API details, and I think I could fairly easily implement the DBIC API atop
RDBO and vice versa (modulo the odd missing feature on either side), so I
beg to disagree with your "they're too different" assertion.

At the point at which I originally discussed it with you I'd have been happy
to write a DBIC layer over RDBO if I'd been permitted to patch a resultset
concept into the latter, but I got the impression you didn't want it at
all; I'm glad to hear that you're planning to eventually add it to RDBO
but at this stage we're a little late in the game for a merge to be viable.

Never mind, maybe we can collaborate on a perl6 ORM when there's a production
implementation of the language for us to code to :)

-- 
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