[Grok-dev] Re: STORM howto

[Martin Aspeli]

Martin Aspeli wrote:

> 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.

Oh, and one more thing - as a data point (and not a whinge, honestly): 
I've personally invested a lot of time in learning and using SQLAlchemy 
for various other projects and I know it pretty well now: I recommended 
it as the SQL integration story for Plone in my book (via 
collective.lead); I've used it in standalone Python scripts extensively 
for a previous project; and I've used to build Pylons applications.

If I were to do a Grok project that required RDBMS integration, I would 
hope to be able to re-use that knowledge. I may be tempted to use Pylons 
instead if I couldn't, just because Pylons makes this so easy. I think 
comparing Grok and Pylons is largely apples and oranges, so if it came 
down to it I may have made a different decision, but that's my gut feel 
right now.

I wouldn't be surprised if other Python developers who'd used SQLAlchemy 
had a similar gut feel. And I *think* that includes a growing number of 
Zope 2 and Plone developers, since there are various SQLAlchemy-oriented 
solutions for Zope 2 and Plone (collective.lead,  collective.tin, 
collective.mercury, collective.rope, z3c.sqlalchemy, z3c.zalchemy 
Alchemist and so on). I've never seen anyone use Storm with Plone (which 
of course doesn't mean that no-one does it).

Perhaps this warrants some wider consultation before a decision is made?

Cheers,
Martin

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