Ideas for lightweight ORM implementation

[allspiritseve]

Stuff like...

http://www.getdorm.com/api/Dorm_Data...ase_Table.html

http://www.getdorm.com/api/Dorm_Data...ble_Field.html

Having to describe your schema in such detail first doesn't seem very lightweight.

Gotcha. I agree. I think people include that stuff so they can create schema from the mappings, but I'd rather just do an SQL dump. Keeping schema stuff out of the mappers definitely makes them lighter.

[Czaries]

What would you leave out? As it sounds you'd leave out dealing with relationships/assocations... which is what snapshotting/tracking changes to collection is for.

$post = new Post();
$post->tags[] = $tag;
$post->save(); 

I would definitely NOT leave out relationships, as that is probably THE primary reason to use an ORM layer. I understand the need to track changes to know which related rows to cascade save and which columns to include, it just seems like taking snapshots of collections and cloning whole object graphs is overkill for a simple solution and would use too much memory.

I was just trying to point out that the current discussion was going way beyond the scope of the original question. I'm not trying to kill this thread .

[Ren]

I would definitely NOT leave out relationships, as that is probably THE primary reason to use an ORM layer. I understand the need to track changes to know which related rows to cascade save and which columns to include, it just seems like taking snapshots of collections and cloning whole object graphs is overkill for a simple solution and would use too much memory.

Don't need to clone whole object graphs, just collection contents, which are just a set of object references. Its either that, or inject a collection class as hydration time that tracks changes to itself.