[admin] new project proposal: Submarine

[Erik Enge]

Sorry for the very long delay.

Done.

On 8/29/07, Ryszard Szopa <ryszard.szopa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I would like to start a project on common-lisp.net. The project name
> is submarine. My name is Ryszard Szopa, and at the moment I am the
> only maintainer. My public gpg key is attached.
>
> >From my README file:
>
> Submarine is a Common Lisp library that's somewhere between a
> PostgreSQL library an an object persistency system.  It uses
> Postmodern to communicate with the database. The basic idea is that
> you create your classes in the metaclass DB-CLASS and submarine cares
> about creating SQL tables or, if the tables already exist, checking if
> they conform to the provided specification.  Moreover, Submarine
> supports an intuitive way of expressing both one-to-many and
> many-to-many relations.
>
> Getting submarine
> =================
>
> At the moment there's only a darcs repository available:
>
>     darcs pull http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/submarine/
>
> You will also need my mop-utilities, which may be incorporated into
> submarine in the close future:
>
>     darcs get http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/mop-utils
>
> Dependencies
> ============
>
> Submarine depends on Postmodern and Iterate.
> It uses also my library of MOP utilities, MOP-UTILS, which may become
> a separate library in the future.  On platforms other than SBCL,
> mop-utils needs Closer-mop.
>
> License
> =======
>
> Submarine is released under a BSD-like license. Which approximately
> means you can use the code in whatever way you like, except for
> passing it off as your own or releasing a modified version without
> indication that it is not the original.
>
> Relation to Postmodern
> ======================
>
> Submarine started as a patch that added, among others, foreign keys
> support to Postmodern.  This meant hacking the DEFTABLE macro and
> TABLE and TABLEFIELD classes.  After some time I realized that my
> modified Postmodern macros had become far too large and heavy to be
> easy maintainable. So, I decided to leave Postmodern's code as it was
> and write a separate library.
>
> Introduction for Postmodern users
> =================================
>
> Submarine tries to keep as much as possible of Postmodern's original
> API. I use the same terminology, and functions with similar names will
> probably do very similar things. My purpose was twofold. First of all,
> I wanted to make porting programs using Postmodern to Submarine
> easy. Secondly, this would allow me to use some of Marijn Haverbeke's
> superb documentation nearly without any changes.
>
> Main differences between Postmodern and Submarine:
>
>  * You don't have to create DAO (database access object) classes and SQL
> tables separately. You just create classes belonging to a certain
> metaclass, and the library cares of the rest.
>
>  * If the table with an appropriate name exists in the database,
> Submarine will test if it has columns with the right names and
> types. If a column does not exist or has a wrong type, Submarine will
> offer the user a possibility to fix it. Submarine will warn, but do
> nothing about any additional columns in the table.
>
>  * Each DB-CLASS class has its own connection specification. This means
> that you can just access your objects, without wrapping them in a
> WITH-CONNECTION macro, and they will care about setting the right
> connection.
>
>  * DAO is a basis class for DB-CLASS classes, and methods that are
> supposed to work on an object of any DB-CLASS class use DAO as a
> dispatch type. Of course, you don't have to use DAO as a base class,
> but it makes a lot of things easier.
>
>  * Submarine supports foreign keys. If you define a DB-CLASS class
> with a slot whose type is another DB-CLASS, it is treated as foreign
> key and an appropriate constraint is added to the database.
>
>  * Submarine provides a function to retrieve all the elements of a
> given type standing in a many-to-one relation with some DAO object.
>
>  * The DEF-MANY-TO-MANY macro defines a many-to-many relation between
> two classes and creates methods appropriate to their retrieval (it
> creates a link table in the database).
>
>  * DB-CLASS slots have an additional attribute TRANSIENT. If you set
> it to a non-NIL value, it will behave just as a
> STANDARD-SLOT-DEFINITION and will be ignored in database related
> operations.
>
>  * Submarine uses MOP rather than macros to achieve its purposes. This
> makes it easier to maintain and to extend.
>
> At the moment there's no real documentation apart from docstrings, but
> there's a poor man's tutorial in the file
> http://bender.streamtech.nl/darcs/submarine/doc/example.lisp (this
> should give you a pretty good overview of the possibilities of
> Submarine.
>
> --
> http://szopa.tasak.gda.pl/
>
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