On 20/12/12 4:18am, Andrus Adamchik wrote:
Now in Ruby (which I barely know) I suppose ActiveRecord is such a great RAD
technology, because when you control the DB, you can sort of avoid (or
minimize) the*mapping* step.
To an extent. ActiveRecord (and most of Rails) is configuration by convention. So,
primary keys are always named "id". Foreign keys have special names pointing to
the table. You can add something similar to annotations to the persisted entities if you
want to change the defaults.
Interestingly, there is still a schema.rb which looks just like a dictionary
for the database entities (including indexes). Rails generates it for you from
the database as you work, but it is still there.
In Cayenne you still need to do the mapping. Once you did it, our current or
planned API could be as friendly as it gets.
There is a lot to be learnt from ActiveRecord's fluent API. So easy to read and
very concise. Some of that clean API comes from the abilities of Ruby itself
(which Java cannot accomplish).
But I can't quite see the point of hiding the concept of Contexts from the
user. Most users new to Cayenne will understand what 'database transaction'
means and quickly understand Context as a similar idea. If we hide context from
the user in this API, does this throw an exception? Or is localObject()
implicit in every setter?
Artist a = Artist.newInstance();
a.setName("Bob");
a.save()
Painting p = Painting.newInstance();
p.setArtist(a);
p.save();
Ari
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Aristedes Maniatis
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