Follow Up: [Catalyst] Alternatives to DBIx:Class?

[John Karr]

Most of the responses to this thread seem to say that DBIC is worth the
effort. I looked at Fey:SQL and SQL::DB and concluded that they also require
some effort, and suffer (along with DBIC) from what is for me a huge issue
-- the documentation focuses on telling you how each piece works rather than
on how to drive the darn thing. 

At this point for everything I'm working on, I have the luxury that I can
write all of my joins and complex statements into a view or
stored_procedure, but in the real world programmers are too frequently
denied this, so even though right now I would like something that just
wrapped the DBI up in a manner that made it easy to write and keep the DRY
principle, it would be potentially more valuable to learn DBIC or Fey. DBIC
is the more widely adapted solution, while Fey seems to offer most of the
same capability with a syntax that draws on SQL (which is a lot of points in
its' favor), but has less momentum and lacks equivalents of some of the
helper scripts that are available for DBIC. 

So let me ask a follow up: What materials would you provide to an
Intermediate Level Programmer to help them learn either Fey or DBIC?
Materials could be working code, articles, things in documentation,
documentation for other things that happens to explain it well, chapters in
books, etc.

Afternote. There is a "tutorial" in Fey::ORM's documentation, but it is more
of a quick run-through. DBIx::Class has a better introduction in its'
documentation, but that hasn't helped me much. The tutorial Kennedy Clark
wrote for the Catalyst Manual was how I figured out Catalyst. Again
developer isn't my normal job title, I will probably never get paid for
knowing anything about ORM, time I spend learning it is only a benefit if it
gives me pleasure (not so far) or saves me time in the long run (the clock
is running the other way).

	
-----Original Message-----
From: Hakim Cassimally [mailto:hakim.cassimally at gmail.com] 
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2010 7:59 AM
To: The elegant MVC web framework
Subject: Re: [Catalyst] Alternatives to DBIx?

On 19 April 2010 12:34, Carl Johnstone <catalyst at fadetoblack.me.uk> wrote:
> kevin montuori wrote:
>> DBIC code has proven trivial to maintain and augment.
> ...how much better things are with DBIC - especially when it comes to
> adding new features into the existing code base.

Absolutely!  When you are doing complicated reporting rollups
(multiple joins, subqueries, aggregate functions) that can be
arbitrarily tweaked, sorted, paged etc. then modifying with DBIC is
often just a case of tweaking a single hash declaration...

(Whereas updating a dynamic SQL codegen may well involve an hour of
headscratching... Not to mention the other hour of debugging later,
because you forgot to add a space or comma that kicks in with some
rarely used set of parameters...)

osfameron

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