[Catalyst] Alternatives to DBIx?

[Ashley]

On Apr 17, 2010, at 7:59 AM, John Karr wrote:
> Thanks Lyle and Ovid for your responses, both SQL::DB and Fey::SQL  
> look like
> saner approaches, and I will take them both for a test drive. I also  
> liked
> the article Lyle referenced.
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lyle [mailto:webmaster at cosmicperl.com]
> Sent: Saturday, April 17, 2010 9:36 AM
> To: The elegant MVC web framework
> Subject: Re: [Catalyst] Alternatives to DBIx?
>
> Personally I think DBIx::Class is the biggest load of crock out there.
> It's much slower, awkward to use, time consuming to learn, and as soon
> as you try to do some complicated queries you'll end up dropping it
> anyway. ORMs simply cannot work in the long run:-
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/06/object-relational-mapping-is-the-vi
> etnam-of-computer-science.html

Just to put it out there -- I think for every dev who has arrived at  
this conclusion there are more who think DBIx::Class and Rose::DB and  
friends are wonderful.

DBIC does have one caveat that can make it bad a choice: it requires  
some rigor in your database schema. Broken, bad, goofy DB  
relationships  make DBIC a poor choice because you might have to  
resort to crazy code to make things work. If your schema is sane,  
everything, even extremely complicated queries are generally easy  
(after you get ramped up, it does have a learning curve).

Of course you can use straight DBI etc and if it's what you're used to  
it will be much faster at first. The main issue is that you'll get  
templates or controllers littered with shims, iterators, raw SQL etc.  
You could of course start pushing it back into the model yourself but  
what that'll be doing is slowly reinventing one of the other ORMs but  
much less well.

This is basically "every Perl developer has to write his own  
templating language once to learn why it's such a bad," part 2. You'll  
have to learn a lot either way. The Stone Soup of rolling it yourself  
is seductive and seems easier but taken as a whole it is most  
certainly not.

-Ashley