Sorry for the very long delay.
Done.
On 8/29/07, Ryszard Szopa ryszard.szopa@gmail.com wrote:
Hello,
I would like to start a project on common-lisp.net. The project name is submarine. My name is Ryszard Szopa, and at the moment I am the only maintainer. My public gpg key is attached.
From my README file:
Submarine is a Common Lisp library that's somewhere between a PostgreSQL library an an object persistency system. It uses Postmodern to communicate with the database. The basic idea is that you create your classes in the metaclass DB-CLASS and submarine cares about creating SQL tables or, if the tables already exist, checking if they conform to the provided specification. Moreover, Submarine supports an intuitive way of expressing both one-to-many and many-to-many relations.
Getting submarine
At the moment there's only a darcs repository available:
darcs pull http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/submarine/You will also need my mop-utilities, which may be incorporated into submarine in the close future:
darcs get http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/mop-utilsDependencies
Submarine depends on Postmodern and Iterate. It uses also my library of MOP utilities, MOP-UTILS, which may become a separate library in the future. On platforms other than SBCL, mop-utils needs Closer-mop.
License
Submarine is released under a BSD-like license. Which approximately means you can use the code in whatever way you like, except for passing it off as your own or releasing a modified version without indication that it is not the original.
Relation to Postmodern
Submarine started as a patch that added, among others, foreign keys support to Postmodern. This meant hacking the DEFTABLE macro and TABLE and TABLEFIELD classes. After some time I realized that my modified Postmodern macros had become far too large and heavy to be easy maintainable. So, I decided to leave Postmodern's code as it was and write a separate library.
Introduction for Postmodern users
Submarine tries to keep as much as possible of Postmodern's original API. I use the same terminology, and functions with similar names will probably do very similar things. My purpose was twofold. First of all, I wanted to make porting programs using Postmodern to Submarine easy. Secondly, this would allow me to use some of Marijn Haverbeke's superb documentation nearly without any changes.
Main differences between Postmodern and Submarine:
- You don't have to create DAO (database access object) classes and SQL
tables separately. You just create classes belonging to a certain metaclass, and the library cares of the rest.
- If the table with an appropriate name exists in the database,
Submarine will test if it has columns with the right names and types. If a column does not exist or has a wrong type, Submarine will offer the user a possibility to fix it. Submarine will warn, but do nothing about any additional columns in the table.
- Each DB-CLASS class has its own connection specification. This means
that you can just access your objects, without wrapping them in a WITH-CONNECTION macro, and they will care about setting the right connection.
- DAO is a basis class for DB-CLASS classes, and methods that are
supposed to work on an object of any DB-CLASS class use DAO as a dispatch type. Of course, you don't have to use DAO as a base class, but it makes a lot of things easier.
- Submarine supports foreign keys. If you define a DB-CLASS class
with a slot whose type is another DB-CLASS, it is treated as foreign key and an appropriate constraint is added to the database.
- Submarine provides a function to retrieve all the elements of a
given type standing in a many-to-one relation with some DAO object.
- The DEF-MANY-TO-MANY macro defines a many-to-many relation between
two classes and creates methods appropriate to their retrieval (it creates a link table in the database).
- DB-CLASS slots have an additional attribute TRANSIENT. If you set
it to a non-NIL value, it will behave just as a STANDARD-SLOT-DEFINITION and will be ignored in database related operations.
- Submarine uses MOP rather than macros to achieve its purposes. This
makes it easier to maintain and to extend.
At the moment there's no real documentation apart from docstrings, but there's a poor man's tutorial in the file http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/submarine/doc/example.lisp (this should give you a pretty good overview of the possibilities of Submarine.
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