On 17 Apr 2007, at 12:35 am, Guyren Howe wrote: > What I would do if I was doing this again is to create a core class > for a DynamicObject that did the Operator_Lookup thing with its > properties, and then let it accept plug-ins that intercept various > operations to monitor or change them. You would then create plugin > generators for the relations and so on. > > You could do something almost as good as the Ruby on Rails ORM (say). > The only really significant obstacle is the lack of first-class > classes The first time I did this, I created a subclass of the > DynamicObject for each table. I don't think I would do that if I > could start over, because it involved writing a lot of almost- > identical shared methods. If we had first-class classes, that would > have been the way to go, but I think as things stand, you should just > have a single class that handles all tables. On startup, you'd be > able to execute calls on it that declared all your relations and so > on. You could then write wrapper classes or something so that you > could still have a class for each table. > > As I say, I have a couple of clients who might be interested in > contributing to a really full-on ORM. If anyone else can throw in, > I'd be happy to lead an effort to develop something we can all use. >
Sounds great! Why don't we do it? Actually, I have been moving my (web) development efforts progressively to Ruby on Rails. I am really impressed by the impact on productivity I get from using a framework like this and I think my application designs have improved as a result. I have been wondering whether there might be some value in putting together a framework approach for building RB applications. I don't necessarily have in mind the whole Rails panoply of application generation, scaffolding and what-have-you, but perhaps a community effort to create an MVC framework for RB applications and promote good DRY and agile design. It could contain such things as exemplary approaches to code distribution between models and controllers, ORM, unit and functional testing, Obviously this is a lot more than my earlier enquiry about ORM. However it seems to me that there is a place for pulling together application design expertise and it might be quite an enjoyable community exercise. I would be very happy to contribute to such an enterprise. RB on Rails, anyone? Ian. -- _______________________________________________ Unsubscribe or switch delivery mode: <http://www.realsoftware.com/support/listmanager/> Search the archives: <http://support.realsoftware.com/listarchives/lists.html>
