[ANN] Lafcadio 0.6.0

[Francis Hwang]

Hi everybody,

Lafcadio 0.6.0, the next production release, is out and available at
http://lafcadio.rubyforge.org/ .

== What's Lafcadio? ==
An object-relational mapping library for use with MySQL. It supports a
lot of advanced features, including in-Ruby field value checking,
extensive aid in mapping to legacy databases, an advanced query engine
that allows you to form queries in Ruby that can be run either against
the live database, or an in-memory mock store for testing purposes.

Lafcadio is more than a year old and is currently in use on production
websites, most notably http://rhizome.org/, an online community that
has a 6-year-old legacy database and gets more than 3 million hits a
month.

== What's new in 0.6.0? ==

Lots, if you've been using the last production branch (0.4.x).

+ Improved querying:
With previous versions you were able to call ObjectStore#get_< domain
class > to infer a query:

users = object_store.get_users { |user| user.fname.equals( 'Francis'
) }

But now you can also call Query.infer, in case you want to edit the
query object a bit:

query = Query.infer( User ) { |user| user.fname.equals( "Francis" ) }
users = object_store.get_subset( query )

You can user Query#and and Query#or to modify it in place:

query = query.and { |user| user.lname.equals( "Hwang" ) }
only_me = object_store.get_subset( query )

You can also now query against the primary key field, and boolean
fields implicitly:

old_users = object_store.get_users { |user| user.pk_id.lt( 100 ) }
administrators = object_store.get_users { |user| user.administrator }

Of course, the point of these queries (as opposed to simply passing in
a SQL string) is that they work just as well with the in-memory
MockObjectStore as with the MySQL database. This means that if your
code uses Lafcadio, you can write complex tests that depend on database
logic.

+ Optional field value checking: You can have Lafcadio verify fields of
domain objects before trying to commit them to the database.

+ De-Java-fied code. Methods are now underscored instead of
camel-cased, classes and test classes are grouped into larger files
instead of their own files,

+ Misc cleanup. Removed a lot of unnecessary methods and classes, and
also sent some methods to live in the Extensions library.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/