Datamapper

A few months back—while we were discussing the number of talking objects appearing on twitter— Jenny pointed out to me that all Heathrow airport arrivals and departures data is online. That set my mind racing, as if you know all the flights leaving that currently controversial airport, there are all manner of things you could begin to do. Working out miles travelled and carbon emitted, spotting delays, and so on. But at the time it all came down to a quick note in Things to some day set aside time to explore. ...

When Ruby on Rails first hit the scene, what attracted many of us to it was ActiveRecord. By providing a declarative syntax for describing relationships, validations, and callbacks it provided an elegance to model code that makes programming a lot more fun. Over the past couple of years ActiveRecord has received a lot of love, with has_many :through and improved caching options being the key additions I’ve enjoyed. But despite all that it’s given, ActiveRecord is clearly not the last word in Object Relational Mappers and it’s been good to see increased attention for some alternative Ruby ORM s such as DataMapper. ...