[orm-devel] Re: ORM

[Ross J. Reedstrom]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 10:35:54PM +0000, Admin wrote:
> 
> 4GL's were all the rage around 20 years ago and included packages like
> Clarion, FoxPro, Clipper, 4D and many others. Some are still evolving
> and quite popular although they are proprietary (evil?). They are 
> mini-languages, that incorporate as much functionality in the base
> language as possible. Clarion for instance handled screen IO (UI) disk
> IO (database) and business logic in a language that was a mish-mash of
> Pascal, Cobol and Basic. They were never real fast but they did the job.
> With Clarion I wrote a complete integrated multi-user accounting system
> in 2 months and a Point-of-Sale add on for it in 8 days.  Both packages
> are still in daily use.
> 
> My next trick is to rewrite my packages using Python as Open Source, 
> and set them free. 
> 
> I look forward to using orm in this process.

Not to chase you away, or anything, but I think you might want to take a
look at the GNUe project, as well as ORM: it's targetted more at the 'all
singing, all dancing' sort of system your talking about. My understanding
of Deidrich's vision/goals for ORM is that it's biggest virtue is in it's
light weight - it's a membrane, not an entire layer. I'd be concerned about
blowing it up with functions like database schema management  - it'd lose
it's lightness, I'm afraid.

GNUe (which is also python based), on the other hand, takes an approach
much like you've suggested above: the 'middleware' handles all the
database work. It's developers come out of your world of 4GLs and
SQL*Reports and such - take a look at http://www.gnuenterprise.org. To
date, they've focused on building tools, but they've plans for packages
(like POS or CR) as well. To get a real flavor of who the developers
are and where things are at, there's a weekly 'news summary' of the
development lists (and IRC logs) at http://kt.zork.net/GNUe/latest.html

Deidrich, you might even want to take a look at what they're doing - it's
a different approach, but sometimes ideas can cross-fertilize. They're
all young and energetic, too. ;-)

Ross