[Grok-dev] Re: STORM howto

[Martijn Faassen]

Martin Aspeli wrote:
[snip Martin threatening to go use Pylons if we don't use SQLAlchemy :)]
> ... 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?

No decision has been made yet. I'm not sure how to go about making this 
decision - "wider consultation" sounds vague to me. Let's just think 
about this carefully and experiment some more.

I think your post does show an important point: there is more momentum 
*in the Zope community* behind SQLAlchemy than there is behind Storm. 
With Storm, we have a bunch of big fish using it (Canonical, Lovely 
systems). With SQLAlchemy, we have a lot of community activity. I think 
that is an important point for SQLAlchemy. (of course that's not to say 
there's no community activity for Storm at all - this thread is an 
example of such after all!)

The other point that bothers me about Storm is that they do not have a 
database schema abstraction in Python. It's not possible to generate a 
RDB schema from Python. They do not generate "create table" statements 
at all. Although they're not absolutely against adding such a feature, 
instead, they prefer and recommend people maintain their RDB the RDB 
way. While I agree that for many projects this is the right approach to 
take, I also think that the lack of such can seriously hinder agility in 
smaller/starting projects (where you just want to get going) and 
"demo-ability". In addition, I think SQLAlchemy allows introspection of 
existing databases, which allows for the generation of cool tools as 
well. Again a schema abstraction is helpful to support this kind of feature.

Do you know whether people have done work integrating Zope 3 schema with 
SQLAlchemy? I think we need a form of integration there, though I'm not 
sure yet what shape this should take.

Regards,

Martijn