Sorry for the late response - missed this thread until now. In my hacking with AR, there have been two big frustrations:
1. A lot of things are done via metaprogramatically rewriting classes, as opposed to breaking things down into an object model. Example: The DSL for validations is wonderful. There have been a lot of requests to make it depend on different contexts (see http://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/ContextualValidation.html ). I tried doing this, but gave up - if you look at the validation DSL methods, they rewrite the class. It's quite hard to decompose them or modify them. A simpler way would be to have a @validations collection in each AR class (or perhaps each instance could have their own). The DSL would add to the collection, and valid? would check them all. Then it would be easy to: * Use the DSL to make validators for different contexts * Use the DSL and non ActiveRecord objects (frequently requested, also) * Add validators programatically (for some of those hypermodern admin interfaces) 2. Handling SQL as strings, as opposed to query + params. This is the big one that all plug in authors seem to complain about. It makes it really hard to get down deep into AR (and can make porting things harder as well). Besides the plugin benefit, handling the SQL as a query + params has 2 *huge* benefits: A. We can, similar to DBI, first create the query, and then use it with new params. According to Stefan Kaes ( http://www.infoq.com/articles/Rails-Performance ) , AR spends more time feeding the db the SQL than the DB takes to run it! B. BLOBs. Passing them into the string makes everything slow and ugly. I would guess a 10x speed improvement on large BLOBs. On this point, what I'd like to see - ideally - is using something like DBI at the base level, with AR building on top of it. DBI lacks some functionality that AR has - but that can be added into DBI just as easily as AR. This would make porting AR to new databases easier, and would also allow cross polination between Rails' users and the general Ruby community at large (who may want to access their db's without AR). (Note: if there are other problems with DBI that I'm not aware of - we could still use something similar - the point is to have 1 layer for querying, reflecting on, and talking to the DB, and another layer for AR's magic) On Feb 24, 8:44 pm, "Michael Koziarski" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Following up on Koz's suggestion to discuss how plugin developers are > > monkey patching AR, I'd like to share some of things my coworkers and > > I have done. > > Calling all plugin authors. If you've been frustrated when adding > functionality to Active Record, speak here, or forever ... yeah :) > > -- > Cheers > > Koz --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ruby on Rails: Core" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rubyonrails-core?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
