pcplantdb

[John Schinnerer <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

> Can you provide a layman's explanation of ORM with MySQL and what the 
> default/alternative would be?

> What are the advantages offered by ORM as the object-oriented approach?

I'll leave these to Chad - he is more familiar with details of this 
stuff than I am.

> Whhat does object-oriented mean in the ocntext of what we are doing and 
> how does it fiffer from non-OO methods?

There's been a lot of posts on this already - check the archives for a 
reprise.

IMO an object model for our project is much more appropriate than a 
relational-database model.

Plant objects (stored in an object DB) would contain information about 
themselves and ways ('methods', meaning essentially bits of code) to 
share than information.
This is essentially what real-world plants do - they 'know' about 
themselves and communicate with other entities in a variety of ways - 
colors and scents to attract pollinators and/or repel predators, root 
exudates to attract symbiotic micro-fauna or scare off predatory 
micro-fauna, and so on.

In a relational-DB model, plants are abstracted as tables of information 
'about' plants, with columns identifying general 
attributes/characteristics of plants and rows containing specific 
information on particular plants.
Instead of simply asking a plant object about itself in various ways, 
queries have to be constructed to de-abstract the abstractions created 
in making the tables, in order to extract the desired information 
'about' the desired plant or plants.

Either approach can be made to do what we want.
I think the relational databse approach will get really really nastily 
complex and hard to work with as we add complexity to both tables and 
queries.

The object-oriented approach just seems way more appropriate - simpler, 
more like what we are trying to model.
We are already a culture addicted to abstraction; I think plant objects 
in an OO database are less an abstraction than relational database 
tables full of bits of data about plants.


--

John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
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