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by David Heinemeier Hansson.
Original Post: Active Record steals the Hibernate show!
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[A] coworker of mine was doing a talk on Hibernate Tuesday night (the OR Mapping tool for Java). About a week earlier, I showed him a bit of Active Record & asked him to throw it into the talk somewhere for perspective.
He showed the many XML configuration files, pile of required libs, a 30-property-long JavaBean supporting the "Client" table, and finally some Java usage of Hibernate to persist and restore it. Everyone agreed - it's great that you don't have to write any SQL and Hibernate does a good job of optimizing queries & managing the object cache. Cool stuff.
Then he pulls out Active Record. :) People were simply amazed that the same result was achieved using Ruby + AR without any of the configuration or dependencies required by Hibernate. Granted, AR can't do everything that Hibernate does, but as far as core functionality goes (the stuff you'll actually *use* in your job) it's beautiful.
Even now people are emailing me about how cool AR is now that they've been playing with it. Thanks for a great piece of software and I'm looking forward to seeing (and using) Rails!
This is my dream response to Active Record. Appreciating that the Active Record pattern is a worth-while competitor to the horde of data mappers and that a Ruby-implementation can remove all the tedious labour from the usage.
I'm even more excited to get Rails on the street now. Just about a week's worth left on vacation (in which I've sneaked in lots of neat Rails stuff on the train from Venice to Rome and will be doing the same on the way back). So late July is now the current target.
Thanks to all the continued encouragement and anticipation. It means the world.
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