colle-info Mailing List for Colle: The glue of good web applications

On Monday, Mar 3, 2003, at 10:09 US/Pacific, Kurt Schrader wrote:

> Don't we have enough Object/Relational mapping layers already?
>

Colle-SQL is not an Object/Relational mapping, and as I see it, neither 
is Torque.  Object/Relational mappers take existing class hierarchies 
and map them to an existing relational schema.  Colle-SQL takes a 
relational schema and creates a class hierarchy to facilitate working 
with the relational schema.

> Why not just help out with Torque instead of building such a similar
> project?

As I said in my original post, Colle is an effort to release some 
existing code to the open source community.  Colle-SQL is the first 
piece to be released.  Other pieces have no direct dependencies on 
Colle-SQL.  More specifically, our middleware and web forms code would 
work fine with Torque.  Our first reaction on learning of Torque was to 
skip Colle-SQL and move directly to Colle-Mid (the middleware portion). 
  But after a closer inspection of Torque we decided the benefits of 
Colle-SQL would get lost if we didn't release it first.

Dwayne

The Colle team is proud to announce the release of Colle v0.1.1 
including Colle-SQL.

http://colle.sourceforge.net/

Torque users and developers may find Colle-SQL of interest because of 
it's similarity to Torque.  In fact, when we learned of Torque several 
months ago the similarity took us by surprise.

Colle-SQL is smaller than Torque and supports far fewer database 
systems (only MySQL and Oracle currently) but accomplishes many of the 
same tasks.

The pattern applied in Colle-SQL is very similar to the pattern used in 
Torque -- define a problem set in XML, validate the XML and generate 
lots of common code.  This pushes Java's strong type checking out to 
the database and back, thereby catching many bugs at compile time.

Some of the differences between Colle-SQL and Torque are Colle uses one 
file per table or view and a database schema is a collection of tables 
and views in one folder.  Torque criteria are replaced by lookup and 
delete methods defined in the table or view.  Lookup and delete methods 
contain simple WHERE clauses so there will be some trade offs in 
portability.  But there are no bizarre side effects as is mentioned in 
"The Gory Details" of the Torque Tutorial.  Joins are implemented in 
views which further simplifies the Torque criteria issue.

I am announcing Colle on this mailing list because I feel this release 
will be of interest to Torque users *and* developers.  My hope is that 
both projects can grow from each other.

More information about Colle-SQL can be found here:

http://colle.sourceforge.net/about/sql.shtml

Colle started as a closed-source ASP project.  Certain reusable 
portions of the project are now being released under an OSI approved 
BSD license.  Future releases will focus on applying the same 
XML/validation/code pattern to web forms, web presentation and 
middleware protocols.

Let us know what you think.  Feedback can be sent to me at 
dw...@sc... or to col...@li....

Dwayne Schultz
Architect

================================
Use the right kind of glue
http://colle.sf.net