P.S.  Thanks too, to Pete Kazmier.  His recently created tutorial was big
help in getting started.

WILL

-----Original Message-----
From: Will Glass-Husain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2002 10:58 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: General comments on Torque


Hi,

I've just spent a month building two apps: one based on Turbine 2.2b1 (using
Torque) and one based on the decoupled Torque (a modified VelocityServlet).
I thought I'd share a few comments in the hopes they are helpful to others.

(1) Torque is really useful. It might even be the most useful part of
Turbine.

(2) Decoupling from Turbine was a terrific idea.  Using the same version of
Torque (within and outside of Turbine) allowed me to share SQL and OM files
easily.

(3) One significant lack in Torque is a "Cursor" functionality, as described
in "The Design of a Robust Persistence Layer for Relational Databases"
http://www.ambysoft.com/persistenceLayer.html.  I did a set of pages that
displayed 20 records from a database at a time.  I had to do a select from
the database each time and choose a subset of the Vector-- probably not the
most efficient technique.  A cursor functionality would have let me do one
pull from the database and use that for the display of multiple subsets.

(4) Another limitation was "Criteria".  Worked really well for simple
queries, but was difficult to use for more complex queries.  (e.g. queries
with aggregate functions, subqueries, and complex WHERE logic).  No good
answer here.  There's clearly some tradeoffs between ease-of-use and power.

(5) One easy thing to fix with Criteria.  Why can I not easily put in
multiple clauses with the same column (e.g. "i > 1 AND i < 1).  I followed
the recommendations on getting the criterion object and linking to that, but
it's a pain.  It's not clear to me why Criteria is based on a hash table of
the columns instead of a vector of some kind that allows additional entries
for columns.

(6) The configuration options for building are not clearly documented, and
caused me some initial confusion.  Particularly the difference between
"database" (the type of database) and "database.name".  If you mess this up,
Torque tells you it can't find the right templates (sent me in entirely the
wrong direction).  Suggestion: check database to see if it a legitimate
value, and give an error if not.

I had to make some modifications in the Torque templates to get them to work
that impact users with more than 10 tables or those using Microsoft SQL.
I'll detail these in a message to torque-dev.  I also have a few comments on
Turbine (problems due to incomplete decoupling), which I'll post to the
turbine-user list.

Best, WILL
_______________________________________
Forio Business Simulations
Will Glass-Husain
(415) 440-7500 phone
(415) 235-4293 mobile
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.forio.com


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