RE: Magritte and Pragmas

Contrast Magritte with Glorp, both are very powerful, and very pluggable. Magritte provides meta data about a class, Glorp needs that same metadata for its descriptions. Magritte is a runtime meta data system, Pragmas are compile time meta data. However, both Glorp and Magritte require explicit meta data in the form of code, stored away from the accessor the meta data belongs to. Pragmas however, allow one to keep the metadata for a selector, in the selector itself, a very pleasing option because while I don't mind the description building bouncing around following description Pragmas, I'd rather the developer didn't have to, and much of the meta data contained within Magritte descriptions, really is just compile time meta data. Obviously Pragmas are less flexible than class side descriptions, I'm not at all suggesting there's anything wrong with Magritte, it's great, but it could be simpler to configure, just like Glorp vs. Rails. Most of the time, when doing database bound web applications, I think one really could use Pragmas like Rails uses macros to give hints to the description builder to automate the construction of "MOST" descriptions, possibly all. It'd be really elegant if one made a field required by simply adding the <required> Pragma to the accessor itself, and then having the runtime generate both the Magritte and Glorp descriptions off the class meta data allowing Rails like behavior and no code required by the developer. For the more complex cases, you could always have the builder follow <description: #authorDescription> to the manually configured class side descriptor, but seriously, most cases will be simple mappings of Strings, Numbers, Dates, and Memo fields directly to a matching field in the database, and those, the most common cases, can be totally automated and work off Pragmas alone. Rails has proven the attraction of zero configuration to the masses, and if Ruby can do it, Smalltalk can do it better. I'm already building an ActiveRecord implementation that builds Glorp descriptions from Magritte's meta data (working well so far), but while doing so, it just occurred to me that most of what I need for Glorp could come directly from Pragmas, and it'd be a shame to build the meta data twice, so I just thought why not build Magritte descriptors from Pragmas as well. It's just an idea, but one I think I'm going to explore a little to see where it leads. Of course, I'll share anything worthy of sharing if anything pans out, if not, oh well, I'm sure I'll have fun in the process. Ramon Leon http://onsmalltalk.com