Avi Bryant's Kansas package?

[Kirk Haines]

Packed with Avi's old Iowa release is a neat little extra that he called
Kansas. It's a nifty little package that wraps database accesses in an
object interface along with some automatic inspection of table structure
so that one need not code the exact structure. One just tells it,
optionally, what the one to one and one to many relationships are between
the tables.

It's more or less exactly the sort of thing that I was looking for, as it
lets me interacts with the database and get my result sets as objects
without requiring me to mirror database structure exactly in my code. And
to think that I ignored it for almost two years! Shameful.

Anyway, my question is -- is there a more evolved/tested/commented version
of Kansas out there anywhere? If not, I am going to, with Avi's
permission, pull it off from the Iowa code tree into it's own package with
a few enhancements to it that I have made and make it available for
seperate download. It's really a sweet little package.


Kirk Haines

 

[Avi Bryant]

Anyway, my question is -- is there a more evolved/tested/commented version
of Kansas out there anywhere? If not, I am going to, with Avi's
permission, pull it off from the Iowa code tree into it's own package with
a few enhancements to it that I have made and make it available for
seperate download. It's really a sweet little package.

Feel free to do whatever you like with that code. It was even more of
a hack than IOWA - literally an evening or two's work, so don't expect
too much from it. I would be surprised if there weren't better O/R
mapping tools for Ruby out there by now, but I haven't kept up. Oh,
and make sure you have the version with PragDave's modifications (if
you pulled it from CVS you should have them).

Most recently I've been experimenting with the idea of modelling the
relational algebra directly as (in my case) first class Smalltalk
expressions, so that you can compose and iterate over SQL queries in
an object oriented way instead of through string manipulation - kind
of like Criteria but more rigorous and (I think) more flexible. It's
pretty nifty. I've blogged about it a couple of times:
http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/userblogs/avi/blogView?searchCategory=databases

If I were going to build yet another relational mapping tool I would
start with that. Luckily all my projects right now use object
databases...