[Gnumed-devel] ORM???

[Horst Herb]

Despite all my recent attempts on a simplified object relational mapping 
interface to trhe backend I believe now that it is not possible using 
this interface exclusively without losing too much flexibility. No 
matter what I do and how I do it, I always lack the power of native SQL 
queries. I suppose I have had some 100 different trial implementations 
now, and I am not happy with any of them (the best try is still the one 
in CVS (pgobject).

Furthermore, the initial parsing of metadata to figure out all 
many-to-many relationships (as opposed to straightforward foreign key 
relationships) wastes too much processor time and RAM for the neccessary 
lookup cross tables. This cannot be delayed / backgrounded since yuo 
never know whether an object has dependent objects beforehand (the 
alternative, namely explicitly naming relationships in constructors, is 
too limiting).

Proposal: a simplified *convenience* interface for common "objects" like 
person, address, etc. in a non-obtrusive and non-exclusive way (meaning 
that it is still 'legal' to use plain SQL should the need arise)
Something along the classic "get/set" wrappers to simplify user 
interface programming? At least to get started for now?

Horst
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perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'