Hi all,
I've just dropped the next development release of Lafcadio, 0.5.2. There's also a bugfix release for the stable branch, 0.4.3. Both are available at http://lafcadio.rubyforge.org .
== What's Lafcadio? ==
An object-relational mapping library for use with MySQL. It supports a lot of advanced features, including in-Ruby field value checking, extensive aid in mapping to legacy databases, an advanced query engine that allows you to form queries in Ruby that can be run either against the live database, or an in-memory mock store for testing purposes.
Lafcadio is more than a year old and is currently in use on production websites, most notably http://rhizome.org/, an online community that has a 6-year-old legacy database and gets more than 3 million hits a month.
== Why only MySQL? What's up with that? ==
Mainly, Lafcadio is written to support my programming, and MySQL is what I use. I believe it would be quite easy to adapt it for another database, but I haven't done so. Part of this is because I'm busy, but also because I haven't heard from anybody who wants to partner with me on this. I don't need somebody to program this part, just somebody to test out new releases with new databases and report lots and lots of bugs. Please contact me if you're interested.
== What's new in 0.5.2? ==
The biggest change is that all those camel-cased methods and accessors are now underscored. Man, once you get those Java idioms into your brain it's hard to get them out.
But there's also a lot more work on the query inference. With previous versions you were able to call ObjectStore#get_< domain class > to infer a query:
users = object_store.get_users { |user| user.fname.equals( 'Francis' ) }
But now you can also call Query.infer, in case you want to edit the query object a bit:
query = Query.infer( User ) { |user| user.fname.equals( "Francis" ) }
users = object_store.get_subset( query )
You can user Query#and and Query#or to modify it in place:
query = query.and { |user| user.lname.equals( "Hwang" ) }
only_me = object_store.get_subset( query )
You can also now query against the primary key field, and boolean fields implicitly:
old_users = object_store.get_users { |user| user.pk_id.lt( 100 ) }
administrators = object_store.get_users { |user| user.administrator }
And there are a handful of smaller changes, too. See the changelog for more.
Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/