[Grok-dev] Re: STORM howto

[Martin Aspeli]

Martijn Faassen wrote:

> It's a good question. I am really on the fence between SQLAlchemy and 
> Storm myself.
> 
> Storm is less high-profile in the Python world. It's high-profile in the 
> Zope 3 world though: created by Canonical who do Launchpad too, and used 
> by Lovely systems. Comes with Zope 3 integration out of the box - it's 
> actually *in* Storm, created and maintained for us by the original creators.
> 
> My impression (not based on in-depth experience) is that:
> 
> * Storm is simpler to use than SQLAlchemy
> 
> * SQLAlchemy has more features
> 
> * SQLAlchemy looks more mature in its documentation
> 
> * Both have good integration features
> 
> * Both have good scalability features
> 
> I was at a talk by Gustavo Niemeyer about Storm last year at EuroPython, 
> and he was *so* careful not to say anything negative about SQLAlchemy 
> in comparison to Storm that I had to ask him what made Storm better at 
> some things. :) Storm *was* written as a response to some lack of 
> certainly scalability features in SQLAlchemy, though to my knowledge 
> these have also been mostly lifted.
> 
> The amount of personal connections from the Grok project to the Storm 
> project are bigger than our connections to the SQLAlchemy project. That 
> counts for something to me.
> 
> Storm being somewhat simpler to use, being engaged in the Zope community 
> and personal connections to creators makes it interesting to explore to me.

These are good points. I don't have a particular preference one way or 
the other since I'm largely ignorant about Storm, except to say that I 
think SQLAlchemy is a marvellous project.

I do worry a bit that if Grok tries to lessen the Zope "ghettoisation" 
(as Chris McDonough is so fond of saying), going with a Zope-focused SQL 
ORM library may be counter-productive. If people who write TurboGears or 
Pylons code have existing DB mappings, the idea of being able to port 
them to Grok and get object publishing "for free" is attractive.

I'm curious how much simpler Storm is than SQLAlchemy in use, especially 
with SA 0.4.

Martin


-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book