Meta Bates

So after my post about dropping ActiveRecord for DataMapper, I’ve received some very interesting feedback, mostly good, which is great. The best comment I received was from Sam Smoot, lead developer of DataMapper. Sam offered to give me commit access to the DataMapper repos on GitHub.

I took Sam up on his offer and I’ve already made several contributions. This is GREAT news for the Mack Framework. When the best technologies start working in concert, only good things can happen.

I’m really excited about what’s happening with DataMapper 0.9.0, and I know it’s only going to make Mack a better framework. I’ve already started working on upgrading Mack to use, the yet unreleased, DataMapper 0.9.0 code base.

I’ll keep you all posted.

I’ve been wrestling with this for a while now, and I’ve finally made my peace with it. I’ve decided to remove native support for ActiveRecord from Mack. From now on it’ll be DataMapper by default, out of the box. This was not an easy decision to make. Essentially it boils down to one of the key tenants of Mack, use the best of breed technologies to build a best of breed framework. I truly feel that DataMapper, especially when it hits the 0.9.0 release, is the best ORM, and persistence, system out there. I also feel that it is a natural fit for the Mack framework.

The other reason why I made the decision was time. It’s very time consuming to constantly maintain two different, and with 0.9.0 extremely different, ORMs. There are plenty of features that I could’ve done faster, had I only been supporting the one ORM.

Now I know I might come under fire from some people for this, but it’s a decision that I think is best for the framework. If some enterprising developer out there wants to build a plugin, or a gem, that adds ActiveRecord support, then I’m all for it! Please do!

The question you’re probably asking yourself now, is when will this be happening. It’ll be happening in the next release of Mack, probably the end of this week or the beginning of next week.

Again, I’m sorry for those of you were hoping to use ActiveRecord with Mack. Check out DataMapper, I’m sure you’ll be happy with it.

Comments?

I’ve mentioned this before, but now the details are finally in. I’ll be speaking at the Boston Ruby Users Group on May 13th.

Here are the details:
Sermo
215 First Ave.
Cambridge, MA

The show starts at 7pm.

Also speaking that night are:

* Daniel Higginbotham will be presenting a tool he developed, Palmist, that is used to optimize MySQL databases on Rails sites. 

* Jonathan Barket will be presenting restful-authorization, an authorization and workflow mechanism built on top of restful_authentication 

If you’re in the neighborhood, and enjoy being a bit of a nerd, come on down.