[Seaside] Look over to Rails and Struts

[Avi Bryant]

On Apr 5, 2005 8:05 PM, Wilkes Joiner <wilkesjoiner at gmail.com> wrote:
> Serving the koolaid with the facts - http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/000408.html
> 
> Towards the end of the post DHH talks about ActiveRecord and rich domain model.

I guess, although the most telling part for me was this, from one of
the comments:

"ActiveRecord::Base makes some really naive assumptions about database
structure. It more-or-less requires an autoincremented primary key
column, which I avoid whenever possible in favor of a natural primary
key. (Yes, I'm a Joe Celko fan.) For instance, it seems absurd to me
to require an autoincrement column on a list of country codes, when
the natural primary key practically leaps out at you.

The other problem with ActiveRecord::Base is that it maps directly to
a table. I don't necessarily want that. Sometimes I use
performance-enhancing techniques like vertical partitioning, etc.
ActiveRecord::Base doesn't map well onto such a thing."

I think the group of people that ActiveRecord appeals to are
programmers who, while they feel for whatever reason that they
want/need to be using an RDB for persistence, aren't experienced DBAs
themselves - they haven't built up their own conventions for managing
schemas, and so are happy to adopt ActiveRecord's, and they don't have
huge amounts of legacy data, so arbitrary complex mappings aren't
important to them.  In the Smalltalk world, the product that captures
this segment is ReStore (http://www.solutionsoft.co.uk/restore/), but
it's only available for Dolphin.  It would be interesting to see if
SolutionSoft was interested in doing or sanctioning a Squeak port.

The guy who wrote the comment above sounds like he'd be much happier with GLORP.

Avi